Recovery disk set nightmare

Question

Dear Lenovo, I recently worked on one of your H520 desktop PC’s for a friend. The hard drive died and I had to replace it. Initially I tried the USB recovery drive I had made on the system prior but without the recovery partition on the drive (original drive failed) it could not restore the pc.
So I found out I could order a Recovery disk set via you’re tech support service (I wanted to get back the recovery partition and reset the pc to the factory install). I called and placed the order for the disk set and I thought it would work no problem for this PC just like any other companies I have worked with in the past like Acer or hp etc.
In the mail, I got the 6 disk set but I was still waiting for a new a 1TB replacement hard drive. So I plugged in a 500gb drive I had as a spare to test the install. It loaded all 6 disks and prompted me to reboot. After that a new screen, the WINPE environment appeared then shortly after another reboot. Eventually I saw a screen with a BSOD type message “your pc ran into a problem and needs to reboot” asking me if I wanted to send to Microsoft or not. In the end all I ever got to was the login screen for windows 8 but with a error box saying the following:
Install windows Windows could not complete the instillation. To install windows on this computer, restart the installation.
This box had a button that when clicked just reboots the pc , creating a loop.
Upon greater investigation on my part I was able to read some of the dos boxes that run while in the winpe environment and there were errors in bold that read as follows: THIS SYSTEM UNCONTROLLED REBOOT DURING WINPE PRELOAD FAILED
And a few lines of things like: Could not find c:\swwork\reboot.tab Could not find c:\swwork\PEboot.tag
I called support, got a case # and during the first call I was instructed that the replacement hard drive had to be the same size as the original or the image would not work. Reluctantly I politely complied and when I got the 1tb drive new in the mail I installed it and tried again. Like I suspected, nothing changed and the system did the exact same thing after the install.
I called again, this time they said it could be the disk set and sent me another one. When I received it I tried again, and it did the same exact thing.
3rd call, the next tech I spoke to told me the hard drive had to be the Exact same model that was in the pc. I had access to the dead drive and looked up the model # I reluctantly ordered the exact same model new on Amazon but in my mind I really felt this was not the cause, yet I followed your instructions. When I got the new drive I tried again but the disk set did the exact same thing.
4th call Tech support told me it was the disk set and the person I spoke to took notes on all the errors I was seeing and he told me I would get a new disk set again but with modifications by the software team to work on this h520. I got a new set of disks and they appeared to be the same exact ones I was sent prior. I ran them and the set did the exact same thing.
The last call to tech support they had no solutions to fix this and I asked for a refund since the recovery set was faulty and it never installed correctly. I was given an new case # and told I would get a call from CR customer relations. When I got the call I was informed that I would not get any form of a refund.
In the end I wound up having to buy a oem license of windows which installed perfectly on the machine. This rules out a hardware issue. Nothing other than the hard drive was changed in the system. I tried all possible bios settings thinking it may be related to that but nothing ever corrected the software errors. When I spoke with tech support I gave them all the info from the pc’s label so they should know what system and any details to what hard ware was in the machine.
I now have to recoup the costs of your 69 dollar recovery set that never worked as well as the extra cost of buying two replacement hard drives due to your tech support team. The owner of the pc had to wait for almost a month due to all the waiting for things to get mailed out etc. Other companies also don’t charge as much as you for a recover set, Acer for example is 19.
When I ordered the recovery disk set, no one informed me that the replacement drive had to be the same size and model. Even though that was not the cause of the problem I did ask how do you support those users upgrading to a SSD which is typically smaller than the original drive and was told those customers are out of luck and have to buy windows again.
I’m at a loss that you can charge for faulty software that doesn’t work. Where the user has to pay upfront and there is no guarantee it will work. I don’t believe I’m the only person in the world who has encountered this issue with your recovery disk set and I can’t imagine how you don’t see how bad this affects your company.
Lenovo, this is unacceptable. I have worked on many pc’s and never have I seen a recovery disk set go this wrong.
P.S. My name shows "whats DOS?" I know quite well how to use DOS, grew up with DOS 6.22 thank you very much.
Mod's Edit:  Edited Subject line for clarity

Answer 1

Welcome BP.
What version Windows do you have.
32bit or 64bit???
REO
HP Expert Tester "Now testing HP Pavilion 15t i3-4030U Win8.1, 6GB RAM and 750GB HDD"
Loaner Program”HP Split 13 x2 13r010dx i3-4012Y Win8.1, 4GB RAM and 500GB Hybrid HDD”
Microsoft Registered Refurbisher
Registered Microsoft Partner
Apple Certified Macintosh Technician Certification in progress.