Making xp primary drive from windows 7 primary drive

[coyoteandhawk]

Hello,I have an old HP mediacenter with failed hard drive, bought a hard drive removed from windows 7 machine to use as boot running XP. Can not recovery discs to recreate XP OS on former windows 7 hard drive. Is it locked and now ruined?

 

[Hawkeye22]

Did the media center come with phsical installation disks or just a recovery partition? If all it had was a recovery partition, you may be able to contact HP and have them send you the physical disks, though they may charge a small fee.

 

[coyoteandhawk]

Thanks for your response.

Here is my update:
I found a disc labeled "Operating System CD, Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2". I believe I received that when I bought the system about 7 years ago. I managed to delete all the partitions and format the single partition. To do that I had to unplug the power plug from the hard drive, then boot from CD, wait for BIOS to open (the system would freeze at the splash screen and would not run BIOS as long as the new hard drive was powered(????)) and then plug the hard drive power connector back in at which point it would recognize the hard drive. I then proceeded to do a format and system install. A very confusing and convoluted routine. I think the hard drive had some software locking engaged - I don't know.

I may now try to use the recovery CD's I ordered from "RestoreCD4u" (HP no longer has them available). The recovery discs would not boot at all when I first tried them. I'm hoping that with a working install of XP Pro the recovery CD's will install the original system, Windows XP Media Center. HP clutter may not be worth it though, so I'm still debating.