Can"t recover XP from Recovery CD's

have an HP Pavilion 513x that was purchased with XPHome OS. The HD failed hard, and the recovery partition was unusable. I replaced the 40G HD with a 20G, as external USB drives are also used. HP noservice tells me that third parties sell Recovery CD's, but they don't, and it's out of warranty. So, I installed Win2000Pro and life was good. Clean install with no issues. The owner of the machine now wants XP back as the OS. I purchased HP 5069-4591 set from Computer Surgeons (they have great service, BTW). I ran the CD's, but the installation failed with "System Recovery - No partition found" I tried this too many times. HP sez to fdisk and format, clear the MBR. I followed their advice again. I fdisked and formated trying to emulate the data and recovery partitions. Still the Recovery CD's stop at the same error condition. HP says bad recovery disks or physical issues! Their PC Doctor program showed all their tests passing (HD, RAM, etc). Computer Surgeons sent a second set of CD's, gratis. Still wouln't load. Reinstalled Win2000 and went surfing for advice and enlightenment. I read that some recovery CD's have an \i386 directory and all the XP files are here. Cool! Made the appropriate bootdisks and ran winnt from the \i386 directory of the Recovery CD. The install started and completed to the point of DOS files completed and I needed to reboot to start the Windows portion of the install. I rebooted and am now getting this message "File \$WIN_NT$.~BT\system32\biosinfo.inf could not be loaded. The error code is 14." The file IS in the subdirectory, and is a txt type file. I burned the \i386 from the recovery CD to a new CD. Ran winnet.exe. from the burned CD. I even copied all the files on the CD to the HD via DOS. and retried without success. I am at Witt's end, lost in the maze... I don't care so much about the programs on the Recovery CD's at this point, just to get the XP OS loaded on this box. Thanks for any assistance!!