recovery disks failed, laptop unusable

Help! I have a Gateway T-6330u laptop that came pre-installed with Windows Vista. I am trying to recover from several problems and would like some suggestions. Without going into a 2-hour dissertation about the beginning of my woes, I will skip to the end...

I was using the recovery disks that I created when I first got the laptop to repair a problem caused by installing a Microsoft security update. The first disk booted fine, came up with the expected screens, and I chose the option to Install (to erase the disk and restore to factory settings). The process started, and the progress bar got to maybe 1% and froze. I left it overnite hoping a miracle would happen, but alas no. I removed the cd and put it in my pc. The files on the disk were visible, so I thought maybe there was a little scratch or something and I would just make another copy of it. The burn process started, but failed with a cd read error. Apparently, the cd was damaged.

The horror story is that apparently, the recovery process was able to erase the data on the C: drive of the laptop, and copy over a few files. It sadly did not copy over any boot records, because now the laptop won't boot at all.

I have an XP Pro boot disk, which I've used successfully to reinstall to a Sony laptop, but when I boot from the cd on the Gateway, I get the following error: cannot boot from cd -- code 5. Followed by: "A disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".

I've successfully used a version of Ultimate Boot Disk for Windows to boot from, and was able to see the C: drive, with 2 or 3 files installed. I ran disk diags, and everything appears to be ok with the hardware.

I've ordered replacement recovery disks from Gateway, but need to use the laptop asap. Does anyone know how I can get windows XP on this laptop from a bootable cd (I have valid legal product key)?

 

Did you try the ALT+F10 key combo at boot time to open the Gateway Recovery Management console on the hard drive?

 

Yes, tried alt+f10 but got disk read error.