Do user-created recovery disks work with replacement HDD of different capacity?

Question

The original Seagate 250GB SATA HDD in my Pavilion G60-214EM notebook has completely failed (BIOS and other Windows machines cannot even see it). I replaced it with a Samsung 160GB SATA HDD but Recovery Manager on my user-created (DVD-R) recovery disk consistently fails at 2% of "Reformatting  the Windows partition of your hard disk drive". If I look at the resulting partitions from another machine I see a 10.61 GB NTFS 'RECOVERY' partition, an empty active primary NTFS partition of 37.12 GB and 101.31 GB still unallocated.
Should the user-created recovery disks work if the replacement disk drive is smaller capacity than the original?
Should they work with a larger capacity replacement drive?
If not, can HP provide recovery disks that will work with a different capacity HDD?
Thanks,
--A

Answer 1

Hi, I am the same predicament as you are From my experience thus far, the replacement disk drive space needs to be bigger or equal to the original HD space. (e.g.. I had a 640 gb OEM HD, I cannot install or factory reset the new 500 gb WD HD because it says its too small...)
As for question 2, I am going to try to get a 1TB hard drive, though I don't know due to the prices and such. Will post back if I do.
Question 3: I do not know, someone else may be more knowledgeable:/ 
Hope this helps!