Hi Cheryl,
Well here is an update. I had her turn on WiFi before the recovery process and say no to rebooting and choose Later.
That allowed it to complete the install. So she has a successful recovery now ;=) Not sure which was the relevant issue but it worked!
Of course she has no faith as she is unsure as to why she crashed in the first place. But we are way ahead of the game now.
In a bit more sleuthing we discovered that. IN 2009 her sytem crashed and she was in college and it was a huge deal.
HP sent her a new HDD but she needed the machine in the interim while it shipped. So I put a HDD in it, did a fresh Vista install and when the drive came, swapped that out and did her recovery on the shipped drive and HP got back the defective drive.
That explains the 160G NON - Advanced format SATA 2.5 inch HDD I have in an external enclosure ;=)
At least all she paid for was Best Buy copying her file to an external hard drive that she can now blessedly see on the laptop.
A happy ending and maybe the Wifi turned on and the hitting later vs a reboot initially at the end of installation will help someone else googling.;=)
Thanks again
Dorothy