I took the HHD out and installed it as a second drive in another PC, going to replace the boot.ini file and see what hapens.
I was planning on what you said about the cd/dvd drives, am going to take them off the expansion board and plug them in the mother board's secondary ide slot. It seems to me that the PC must boot up to use the expansion cards. I asked HP this question, how do I get back into my machine if it crashes. They didn't give me any kind of reasonable answer. I have a Linux OS disk that boots up to a program called UBANTU. I can look at and edit anything, but I have to get the disc drives to work. Will let you know and thanks for the info on the HP recovery disc, will check that out