hp dv2615nr cant restore windows

[eyeheartgreen]

its a hp dv2500 (dv2615nr)
vista home 32bit
turion 64x2
no idea what kind of mobo or hd

windows crashed about 2 weeks ago i ran the harddrive self test in bios both quick and comprehensive came back good. (altho it wont save the results) i have the restore cds and hp also has the restore partition on the harddrive. the cds i got straight from hp last time this happened. Forget the name of teh program or whatever that runs after installing windows (it installs drivers and configures windows) something gui i think but it always fails. about 75% through it just gives an error about corrupted files. no matter which i use whether its the restore partition or the cd's it always fails. last time it did the same thing but it was under warranty so hp fixed it no problem, but now its out of warranty and i have ran out of ideas.
only option i can think of is try to just install a regular copy of windows vista and see if that works but im not sure if it will. figured id like to check before buying a copy of vista. any suggestions is greatly appreciated

[rjfvillarosa]

I wouldn't trust the HP diagnostics for the harddrive test, either download the harddrive manufacturers diagnostic tool and test the harddrive or download the ultimatebootCD and use the harddrive diagnostic tools.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html (download the iso in the left hand column and create a bootable cd with your cd burning software)

You should also test the memory in your machine using memtest.
http://www.memtest.org/#downiso (download the Pre-compiled bootable iso and again create a bootable cd)

You will need to alter the boot sequence in the BIOS to boot from the CD first, some of the HP boot screens allow you to press the F12 key to select a boot device, this saves changing the boot sequence in the BIOS.

[eyeheartgreen]

the hd test was in the bios not sure if thats hp or manufacture. its currently at geeksquad and they called me and let me kno just a few minutes ago that the harddrive is perfectly fine. nothing on it. but perfectly fine. i told them it wont let me install windows but i dont have the money for them to do it... any ideas??

(more like everytime i install windows using the recovery feature on the harddrive or the recovery cds its always gets an error for corrupted data)

did a little bit of digging around last night. messing with the laptop trying to get an idea about whats going on and ive done nothing but raise more questions.
Error 0x4001001300001002
remove recovery partition
go to recovery manager click advanced options
their are bullets like you could make a selection but no description of what the selection is

im wondering if im gonna have to reimage the harddrive or if thats what reformatting does.
(it stalled out trying to recover from the cds no errors but jsut stalled out) ive downloaded those tools and im going to run them in the next hour or so ill post the results