recovery discs are the worst thing since the congestion charge lol.
right sound like you have got a pre-built pre installed system thats gone wrong, and it also sound sliek the partition that you are installing the new installation is quite frankly knackerd.
so what i would do i delete all the partitions (it will give you easy instruction on screen) and since you are starting fresh don't have to panic so much .
generally give a portioned drive if say ona 80gb HDD around 10-20gb for the main partition , this is the one where you are going to install the new operating system, you can later format the other partition so you can save files etc to it .
you would need to delete all partitions so that it gets you to start from fresh, and then create a partition so say 20gb would be 20000, place that number in and your sorted.
carry on with the installation, preferably xp disc... i would use the pro version and not vista as you have more chance of success, you also need to select a full format and NTFS and NOT a quick format as this ensures that the HDD is dealt with and gets rid of most to near all issues.
Mathew lisett, December 2007