sigh...well, I have borrowed a couple CD Boot CD's and none work. Someone told me I need the exact one from the manufacturer and those arent available.

The symptoms are still:
1) A " Starting HP PC Sytems Recovery bar (dashed lines that turn solid) comes up..it completes
2) A black and white HP logo comes up for a few seconds
3) The blue and white more modern looking HP logo comes up...with options for setup and recovery (but f10 for recovery only starts this loop over and there is no recovery screen)
4) Then it loops back to step 1

Note...I can change the bios to boot from CD and it will read oltpe and reatogo and load them...but it will not read any boot CD

Any suggestions versus me taking into a shop to fix ($$)?????