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UEFI, HP Recovery Discs, Windows 8 and SSD drives....?

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Good afternoon folks, this is really giving me a headache!

I just got a new laptop (hp dv7 7338ea), a Windows 8 machine. I ran the HP recovery disc creation burner, and it burnt a bunch of DVDs (which you can only do once), and it verified them. I’ve used similar discs before on my old HP laptop when the HDD failed, and what I want to do here is apply these new Win8 restore discs to my new SSD (Samsung 840, http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/c...-7td250bw.html).

So I swapped the drives over, and booted up the first disc. It went fine, it seemed to be happily able to format and start copying files, and then it asked for restore disc 2.

However, when I put that disc in, it just kicks it out again and continues to ask for disc 2. I put the disc in another machine and it loads fine, I tried copying the image to another disc but it didn’t like that either. Google suggests that people have been having this disc 2 issue for a few years across numerous devices, with no solution.....

SO! I thought right, it won’t let me use the discs, maybe I’ll just image my original hard drive and apply that image to the SSD. It took me a while to get the laptop to boot from the CD at all, and when I got Clonezilla running it couldn’t even see the HDD I had connected (via USB). It could tell there was something connected to the USB but...yeah.

I managed to use a different machine to copy the HP "Recovery" partition to another drive, but couldn't boot into it.

It’s one of those new UEFI computers, and it’s the first one I’ve come across, and I’ve seen stuff online suggesting that the system does all sorts of weird stuff to make life harder, but this is where I’m at a loss and you, being well up on the current state of the tech world, might know some solutions I wouldn’t think of!

Oh also, the BIOS has some weird legacy setting that’s disabled that suggests it’s for pre Win8 OS’, and when I try to turn it on it asks me to enter a confirmation string of numbers, and that concerns me, because that usually means whatever I’m doing is pretty serious, and seeing as I don’t know what it is, I’m not going to touch it!

It also has something called Secure Boot, which from Googling I think I have a basic understanding of, the problem is I don’t want to disable Secure Boot, as I’m concerned it will wipe the “keys” it uses and then I won’t be able to get them back for my HP Win8 system.....

I’m actually strongly considering buying Windows 7, disabling this UEFI thing as much as possible and giving up all my HP software. But I don’t want to, I bought Windows 8 (well, it came with this machine), and I'd really like to use it!

Do you guys and girls have any ideas? Thank you very much for your help :)

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