How can I cancel recovery from the wrong disc and restart with correct one?

The hard drive on my laptop failed, and I have purchased and installed a new one. Unfortunately, due to my own stupidity, I put in the wrong recovery disc. I have an Acer Inspire with windows 7, and I mistakenly put in the disc from my previous HP laptop which was running windows xp. As soon as I saw the HP logo pop up on screen I realised what I had done, but the cancel button is greyed out, and I don't know what to do for the best.

As I type this, the HP recovery disc is still being installed. I would be very grateful for any help, please.

 

Just unplug the power, put the right disc in and away you go.

 

Thanks for such a speedy response. I'm sorry, I should have said that I already tried that, but when I put in the correct disc, I got a screen asking whether I wanted to format completely, reinstall windows and keep my data or exit. The only option not greyed out was to exit, and that just looped me around to the same screen again. So I put the incorrect disc back in to finish the install whilst I carried on searching as I couldn't see any other way to access my computer otherwise.


However, the recovery had already been running for a while whilst I searched for a solution, and has now suddenly finished. So I have XP installed and is at the stage of setting up the computer for first use. What's the best way for me to format from this stage and install the correct software?

I'm not computer savvy and could only install the hard drive because it was two screws an push it in!

 

Apologies - looks like I should have waited and not panicked and jumped on here straight away.

Skipped through first set up, closed down and rebooted with the correct disc in and my laptop is now happily formatting and installing from the Acer Windows 7 recovery disc. Looks like all will be ok, and have answered my own question.

Sorry folks!

 

No apologies necessary. We all have these dry mouth heart stopping moments when we're learning so asking first is just sensible.

 

Slinking back in to say that didn't work.

The disc appeared to go through all the copying and updating etc fine, and got to the end, stated it was finished and asked me to confirm a restart. But on restart, I get the message "A disk read error occurred Press Carl+alt+del to restart" but all that happens if I do that's I go back to the same error message.

It offers "press f11 for emergency recovery" and if I do that it takes me to the HP recovery from the first incorrect recovery installation that i did. So the Acer recovery doesn't seem to have removed all the HP stuff.

Can anyone help with what I can do to fix this?

 

As you seem to have at least one working computer I would download and burn to disk the Partition Wizard Bootable CD and use that to remove all partitions and reformat the hard disk.

Then try again.