hp 530 refuses to boot windows

[grasshopperbe]

i have a rather strange problem with an hp 530

it belongs to one of my boss's kids, When i got it, they said, it doesn't start up any more.

so i pressed the on button, the bios boots, but the moment when the hard drive is supposed to start
(ie start windows) it just sits there with a blank screen.

First i checked the bios settings (maybe the kid messed them up) but all seems fine there.

I got a new HD and switched it out. When i booted it, i got the "no system disk or disk error" message (empty hd, no partition) so i figured, at least it doesn't have blank screen any more.

to see if the hard drive would be recognized, i put in my retail win 7 disc, but the laptop simply refuses to boot from that (i put boot from cd as first in bios to be sure)
its also blank screen, nothing happening

After that i got my old windows xp disc and tried that. it boots up , but when i get to the point where it should give me HD partitioning, it says "no hard drive found".

Not really knowing what to do any more, i put in an ubuntu 10.4 disc, and amazingly, it boots perfectly, it installs to HD, and now it works perfectly on ubuntu ! Sadly i fear this is not going to be an option for a kid.
(playing games etc)

I also hooked up the original hd to my own pc via usb converter, and i appears to work still, but my virus scanner is not giving much hope when scanning it
(trojans viruses etc) so i haven't looked to the contents of it yet

As a last resort, i know someone who has exactly the same laptop. could i maybe try to make a "restore to factory CD" with that machine, and try to fix "broken" one with it?

any tips are welcome

sorry for the long read

[glc]

XP doesn't see a hard drive because it needs a driver for the controller.

You can try doing a system recovery from the recovery partition. Press F11 on startup.

[grasshopperbe]

i tried that too (forgot to mention it sorry) as one of the earlier steps, but it just leads to the blank screen again.
(wich led me to believe the hd was broken)

is there any way a virus or something similar could have caused it? scanning the old disk with avg gave a whole bunch of alerts

i'm hoping i can get it solved with a recovery disc or so from that identical machine (or maybe try to clone the partition), but has to wait a few days untill i can meet up with the guy who owns it.

[glc]

If the machine is identical, a recovery disk made on it should work.

Have you ran diagnostics on the drive? I believe HP has bios-level diagnostics like Dell now.

[grasshopperbe]

i hadn't done diagnostics yet, so i hooked up the original drive again, after the scanning process (it does it 3 times different) it says the drive is healty. still won't boot from it though

i also went by my mate to make the recovery disks, but he
asked me a possible very important question, if i use his recovery disks on a second machine, will it be legal ?

because according to him the recovery procedure does not ask for the vista serial number (on the bottom of the machines). Can i somehow change it to the proper serial number before going online with it? i don't wan't to risk making my mates vista serial number invalidated.

[glc]

It doesn't matter. The recovery disks are not serialized. It should work fine with your COA key and will work fine on his with his key.

[grasshopperbe]

Thank you very much Glc,
the recovery disks did the trick , i restored them on the new hard drive (since i bought it anyway and it has more GB than the original) , everything installed fine , just finished installing avg on it so at least it has some protection this time.

Hopefully this will be remembered by my boss next time i ask for a raise