HP Recovery Partition Start?

Hi, i'm currently trying to fix a HP Pavillion.
There is only 1 partition on the HDD which is the Recovery one, Great! However without the O/S partition i cannot start this, i've tried using F10 and F11 on startup which did not work, there is no option in the bios either.
I've even tried loading another O/S (xp pro) to set the recovery partition as active but this still did not work.
I went into the recovery partition through win xp and got the recovery started but because windows was running it kept failing on every other file (this was expected)
Does anyone know how to start the recovery? Maybe creating a boot disk to start it off? ? CD or Floppy

Thanks