HP Recovery DVDs

Hi,
I have multiple questions, I recently purchased an a6152n, and created
my recovery DVDs.
I wasted 2 dvds because the process kept failing, so I called HP, and
they remoted in and successfully burned the DVDs.

Question1:
I want to test these DVDs to make certain that they are in fact good,
I thought about using MS virtual PC 2007 (I know it's not compatible
with Vista, but it seems to be working) But when I run the VM it comes
up with an error: "This PC is not supported by the System Recovery
Discs. You will not be able to continue to recover this system with
these discs." How does the discs know that it's not the same PC? The
PC must have a file / serial# embedded somewhere? I want to trick the
VM into thinking that it's the orignal PC and run the recovery discs.

Question2:
Once I am confident that I have a viable safety net, I want to
experiment with the partitions, I want to blow away the recovery
partition and split the HDD into three parts, Vista, XP, and
documents. My old PC was configured similarly with 2 xp partitions and
1 document part. How can I install and activate a clean version of
vista using my HP license?

I can supply additional information as needed.

Thanx,
YF