I am trying to reinstall my buddies OS on his HP Pavilion. His CD-Rom drive is not working because it got to much dust in it while he was in Iraq so I am doing the installation thru an External CD-Rom drive. It is Windows XP and when I run the recovery disk everything goes fine up until I am instructed to put the second disk in. I hit OK and I GET a ERROR:

Cannot load bitmap x:\i386\system32\res256\banner.bmp

When I click OK the computer turns off and tries to load up to finish the installation, but gets stuck on a blank blue screen and does nothing. I know that it is reading the external drive because verifies the system configuration and then freezes.

Could it be that there are corrupt sectors in the HARD drive? Should I try replacing the hard drive?

When he first gave the computer to me it had so many viruses and corrupt sectors that it would not even allow me to run the installation of and kind of recovery programs.

Please Help

Thank you,
MikeSince restore disks are OEM Preinstall, they include many files that aren't required such as the banner bitmap. If I were you, I'd copy the contents of the CD to a directory, Delete the files in the i386\system32\ folder, excluding NTDLL.dll and SMSS.exe and the other DLLs they may have there.

Reburn the disk and it should work.One more thing, your friend's restore disk will contain a file called WINNT.SIF in the i386 folder. OPEN it in notepad and it should contain the Windows XP Product Key. You can use a different XP disk of the same version and service pack with that product key to skip the OEM Preinstalled OS. HOWEVER, by doing this you'll have to redownload the PC drivers, default software, and firmware.XP fits on one CD...
Where are these disks from and what do they say on them ? ?They are the disks that came with the computer. It is a HP and they say System Recovery on them. It basically states "Insert disk to restore computer back to original manufacture settings". I believe that the first disk is XP and the second disk has the drivers. HP tries to simplify the process for novice users.I think the problem may be that you are trying to install windows from a usb CD drive. Try to use a laser lens cleaner on the computer's CD drive to see if it will read the disks.And gently clean the CD's...
Use a lint-free cloth and wipe out from the center...not in a circular motion.