used recovery disks now have no operating system

chris, it seems that the Recovery Disk does not actually store the image for your system on itself, but rather accesses a partition on the original HD that contains the image. you may either have deleted or the partition is not available, so the CD cannot access it to restore an image. If you can get your system BIOS set to boot from CD and use a Linux LIVE CD to check the partitions on your computer, see what you find. You can of course use programs like FDisk etc as well. Also, you may want to try this place and create your own startup disk. As for a new OS, you might be better served to go out and buy a copy of Windows. Hope this helps, good luck.