COnan, he can't do that. The recovery CD provided by COmpaq can only work within windows. You can't AFAIK reformat and the stick the recovery CD in... It's not like a full version CD. It's non bootable. and it wont work without windows. I had this problem with a friends Presario 7200 many moons ago with windows 98se. I tried to upgrade his OS to windows 2000, It wouldn't work, so we thought we could go back to his recovery CD. It wouldnt work. I finally got windows ME to boot onto his Pc, and that is what he is using now.

The only way I can think he can restore it, would be to use a real windows XP CD, and then restore it from within the clean install of XP.
That is what sucks about restore CD's.
BB