Sony recovery disks will not work

I have a VGNFE550G VAIO that needed recovery disks to reload Windows XP. When they arrived I put in disk 1 and the screen read "VAIO recovery disk starting" the status bar filled to white and a "please wait..." appeared and the computer never moves again. I've tried a new HDD, new optical drive, had "Geek Squad" run diagnostics, talked to Sony forever, and no one seems to know what to do. Does anyone have any knowledge or expertise concerning this problem. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

try waiting longer.

i didn't use my recovery disk but the f10 method. it took a long time to recover. should be no longer than an hour. at times i thought the computer froze but it didn't

 

Thanks. I've been seeing the "please wait..." for a couple of weeks now and as I replace these parts I'm waiting a shorter and shorter time to give up and try something different. I'll spin the disk and let it sit today and see if I have different results tonight. Again thanks for your reply.

 

Let the computer sit for 10 hours, still has the screen reading "please wait..."

 

Thought that I would revive this thread. Same problem here, same system using the factory bought recovery DVD set. At the "please wait" screen the keyboard is diabled and the DVD spins down. No matter how long that you wait........

To note, the owner zero wrote the hard drive.

Reset the bios to the factory defaults, called Sony..the response was "the disks seem to be working correctly!"

Any thoughts?

 

Bump Any suggestions would be welcome. even if the owner borked the system!

 

probably the hd is bad or the recovery disk wasn't burned properly/degredation due to poor quality media

if possible try the f10 method

 

The recovery disks are factory disks just purchased from Sony. I tried the recovery media on my desktop and it boots to the point of telling me that the disks are not for my system. So, that seems to tell me that the recovery disks are good. At least that is what Sony Live chat told me.

The hard drive seems fine. I can format it using any bootable utility and run Linux on it fine as a live cd. Linux also sees the drive fine and can write to the hard drive.

The F10 method fails as well with the same result.