I bought my Acer laptop 4 years ago with Vista Home Premium x86. It has a recovery partition that I have used successfully in the past to format everything and reinstall Windows to factory settings.

I have since upgraded to Windows 7, but I now need to get back to my original installation. Not sure what it's called, but I can successfully get into this recovery thingy:

However, when I click the third option (for me I think it says 'Windows Image Recovery' or something like that) it tells me that it can't find any images to recover from :(

I have checked and I don't have a windows.old that I can recover from either.

One final note, if I launch diskmgmt.msc, these are the partitions:

1. Why is the first partition shaded? Does that mean anything?
2. Both of the 'unlettered' partitions are 100% empty. Did the Windows 7 upgrade process format my Vista system recovery partition?!

And finally:

• How can I get back to my factory settings?

EDIT: I did see this question, but neither of the answers apply to my situation.

Edit to address jdh's answer:

From what I can tell, I never get the option to boot the Vista recovery partition. After hitting F10, I get this screen, except it's partition 2, and I don't have the IN/MINT bit:

I hit Escape, and then I get this screen, except without Ubuntu listed, and without the auto-countdown thing:

I hit F8, and then I get this screen:

I hit Enter on the first option, I end up at the screen in the first screen shot. As I said, from there I click the third option, and it fails to find the image, which I guess makes sense if it's only looking for a Windows 7 recovery. So I either need to make the Windows 7 tool see the Vista recovery partition, or I need the boot loader (?) to let me select Vista earlier in the process.

Any ideas?