HP Recovery Not Working...

I got this HP Dv8000 laptop a few months back. Instead of coming with the normal 3-4 disks, all of the drivers, applications etc are all on this HP recovery Partition. I thought it was kinda cool, 'cause it meant not having to look after 4 disks, which i ant good it.

A while back i reset the laptop back to the way i got it through this HP recovery thing. Everything was fine and dandy. PC was back to the way i got it and i did what i had to do. Installing my games etc. Now i would like to do that again, however, there is a slight problem. the steps the laptop should go through are as follows:

1. Connect Laptop to the AC power adapter.
2. Close all programs.
3. Click Start, click All Programs, select System Recovery, and click PC Recovery.
4. When the recovery options are presented, select the option to perform the PC Recovery and click Next.
5. The PC will restart.
6. When the Welcome to PC Recovery message displays, click OK to continue. Wrong. PC loads windows as if it were a normal reboot.
7. On the System Recovery panel, select System Recovery. By default, the system will perform a complete reformat and will destroy all user data.
8. Restart the PC when prompted.

Really don't know where to go with this. I've checked all my drives for errors and/or bad sectors, virus, spyware. But everything is OK, or looks that way. I tried putting in a normal XP disk to reformat the hard drive, but it says and can't find any :S Odd.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.