Recovery errors 1002 and 1005, each on diff attemps

Hello I am trying a system recovery on my hp notebook g60-447cl vista home premium SP2 using the disks that came with the laptop. I know I don't need the disk because of the internal method of recovery but I wanted to whipe everything from my HDD and I read that this was the way to do it. Now when I get all the way back to where it says it is formatting the windows partition I got the "error 1005" contact support if this continues message(this is my first attempt).So I reset and try again only this time I get the "error 1005" message and same about support. If this cant be fixed then i have really wanted to try Linux would this be a good time to try or do I need to figure out a solution to this problem first. Linux mint 13 "maya"-cinammon 32bit is what I want to try and it is meant to run with with another OS installed. Any help advice will be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!