I had to have hard drive replaced. Now I am having trouble booting up recovery disks.

Depending on why the drive failed, it may not be possible unless you want to spend some serious money and send the drive into a company that specializes in data recovery.

Rita,

Most computer recovery disks will perform the formatting for you. (This depends on the Manufacturer and Model though...)

If you put the recovery disk into the computer CD/DVD Drive and restart the computer - to boot to the disk, it should launch the recovery process and warn you that the hard drive will be erased and all data will be lost. This warning step is the recovery disks way of informing you that it will format the drive.

To boot to the CD/DVD you will need to tell the computer to do that. When the computer first turns on, you should see a brief message at the very beginning of the boot up process. The message will say something like: "Press Del for Boot Device" or "Press F12 for Boot Menu" or something of this sort. If your recovery disk is in the drive and you can get to the boot menu by pressing the key the computer prompts you to press, then you should be able to start up with that recovery disk.

Allowing the recovery disk to run through it's full process should format the hard drive and set your computer straight.

Make sure to run all of your updates once the recovery is complete and also make sure to install and update a good anti-virus software of some sort.

this usually happens when the computer is trying to boot from a disk that isn't a valid boot disk.

if you have a floppy drive plugged into the multibay and a floppy in the drive, try removing the floppy.
if there is no floppy involved, try to boot from your system recovery disks, as it's likely that the boot record on the hard drive will need repaired. your system recovery disks should walk you through the process.

Disconnect the "data" and "power" cables from the disk-drive.
Boot from the Recovery DVD, just to prove that your computer can boot. Of course, you may get an error-message, when no disk-drive is detected, but you will have proved that your computer can boot properly.

Connect a different disk-drive, and boot again from the Recovery DVD, to confirm that it will boot, when some "other" disk-drive is detected.

Your hard drive is hopefully corrupted. (the alternative is a drive failure and that's worse) You will need to boot to a Windows systems disk and do a recovery repair of the the system. Microsoft has documentation here. Then if the drive is not recognizable at all, you will just have to replace it.

Hopefully you have a backup. Large capacity USB drives are dirt cheap right now and well worth the $70-$90 investment.

Your optical drive is not reading the disk properly - a common issue as time goes by. Replace drive with a good known working unit and your recovery operation will take place.

0xa 0000000 is a hard drive error .. either your controller or your hard drive has failed ..

Since you are comfortable with working inside your computer, the best thing to do now is to purchase an external enclosure for your type of hard drive, SATA or EIDE.

Alternately you can use a live linux cd, boot up with that, and transfer your data to an external drive.

Once your data is safe, try booting to the Windows cd and attempt a repair installation.

And finally, yes, hard drives can go bad in 2 years or less.

This generally indicates a hard drive failure. You can try to do an operating system repair with the recovery or operating system disc, but most likely you will need to replace the hard drive.

When you see the IBM screen you need to enter the boot menu. On this screen it tells you what to press to get to the boot menu. Place the recovery or operating system disc in the drive, and select the CD drive from the boot menu, then follow the directions. If the repair doesn't work, then reformat the hard drive and install a new operating system. If you have any issues during or after the format or install, then the hard drive has failed and will need replaced. You want to do a full NTFS format, not the quick format, if the hard drive is bad, it won't format.

After installing the new hard drive, you'll need to boot the computer from the recovery disk and follow the instructions to format the drive and install windows. You'll also need to install drivers from the driver disk after Windows is up and running. If the computer won't boot from the recovery disk, you'll need to access the "setup" utility and set the CDROM drive as the first boot device. To access the setup utility, press the Delete key after turning on the power. I hope this helps!