I'm configuring a new HP Pavillion DV4 with a 320 GB disk. I made the recovery DVDs, then did a couple other things (including deleting the recovery partition), and finally decided to restore the system.

Unfortunately, the recovery process fails; the three DVDs are read (the recovery program says "Reformatting the Windows partition" and "Copying files required to restore the hard drive") but after it finishes reading the 3rd, and the progress bar reaches 100%, it fails with error 0xe0f00013 - Googling it didn't return anything at all.

I'm afraid this may be because I deleted the partitions. So, I'm kindly asking for one of the following, in order of preference, from a HP Pavillion DV4 with a 320 GB hard disk or a similar enough one :

1) A dump of the MBR

2) The type and size of all the partitions in a "new" system

so I can try to make a partition table resembling the original one.

BTW, I thought the recovery DVDs were supposed to work even if the entire disk was wiped - isn't that the case?

Thanks!