HP Recovery Disk Is Blank?

My dad and I are working together trying to fix these problems on his HP Pavilion P6277c Win7 machine. We finally decided that a complete wipe and reinstallation of the OS is the only way to go. It was so fargone that we had to use Knoppix just to back up files to an external drive. (I don't know how it got this way; I can only guess a bad driver installation because it seems like it was after a printer driver was installed that this started.)But there are three recovery disks, and the first one is blank. He made the three disks when he got the computer, I'm guessing using HP's automated program, and when we tried to start the reinstallation, the first disk is just nothing. We put it in another computer and it said "Blank medium."

(I'm going to use this opportunity to vent, because it's infuriating to me that HP refuses to provide a normal reinstallation disk, and instead uses these "Recovery" disks that don't work and include the same bloatware that comes with it. Ok, now I'm back to being civil.)We have the Windows 7 install disk for my computer because it's custom-built and I bought the license separately, but it's the OEM copy from Newegg and we really don't know if the license stuff is going to let us install on another computer. And that won't include the drivers. It's a possible solution that we're going to try, but it's not optimal in my opinion