Unable to activate Vista

Hi

I wanted to restore my HP dv6 2525ei to factory default - Vista home Premium. When I put in my 1st recovery disk it said bootmgr is missing. I got the same when I tried the recovery partician. I was unable to fix that, so reformatted C: drive and installed Vista Home Premium using a retail version.

When I tried to validate my license no on the bottom of the laptop I am told it is not valid. I tried the phone validation, which asked for the first 6 digits of my product no. Our phones do not have (-) option, so I got onto a live operator. She told me I was not giving her the correct number which I got by typing slui.exe 4 into "run" before I had finished giving it to her. (She was trying to speak english in a chinese chatter manner and I could barely make out what she was saying, she got annoyed when I kept asking her to repeat herself, and she cut me off. I tried again hoping for a different operator, but no luck.)

The number starts 89578-022- thats as far as I got before she said I had the wrong number.

I tried magical jelly bean and got the same number. Can anyone tell me what the next step should be? I have tried phoning microsoft validation in UK and South Africa - and each time they have tried to get me to dial phone numbers that can only be accessed if you are in their country. Microsoft does not have a centre where I am.