Vista to XP and trying to get back to Vista

I have a HP Pavilion dv2500 special edition laptop. I bought it from circuit city in 08'. It came with vista installed on it and it has a recovery hard drive on it. I got tired of vista being so dang slow that I decided to format the hard drive and install XP. Now two years later I think I would like to give vista another try, but I didn't make any recovery disks before I put XP on. I still have the recovery hard drive with vista on it and I can see it and all of the folders in My Computer. So it is all still there because I have never touched it. I thought I would be able to just reboot my computer and hit F11 to go into the system recovery and format it that way and put vista back on. (As anyone that works with computers knows it is never as simple as it is supposed to be). When I hit F11 it doesn't go into system recovery and windows boots as normal. So tried again and nothing. So I held F11 down and it beeped at me and booted windows anyway. So my question is....... how can I get to system recovery from XP when it wont load from F11 and without recovery disks? Is there a way to make the recovery disks from XP since all of the information for vista is still on the other hard drive? Or is there a program that I can use that forces my computer to go into system recovery? I tried supergrubdisk2. But it didn't boot into supergrub it still booted into windows. I do not want to buy recovery disks either, I'm a cheapskate.