Acer d2d recovery to factory settings problem

Hello

I have an Acer Aspire 5633wlmi notebook,which came preinstalled with XP MCE.

I burned a recovery disk straight away and it has been very useful in getting the machine back to factory settings.

Last year I upgraded to Vista.

There are 2 partitions : the hidden PQSERVICE and a single NTFS section of 106GB...previously this was made up of an NTFS partition and a FAT32 one,both 53GB.

I want to revert the machine back to factory settings and have no trouble in using the ALT+F10 function.

However,if I use either the hidden partition or the recovery,it fails before completion with two messages :

Cannot find file: c:\preload.tag

Cannot find file: x:\preload.tag

The message uising the recovery disk is slightly different:

RECOVERY32 Cannot find preload.tag for setboot.ini



According to the Acer 'experts' this is because the original MBR record was erased during the Vista upgrade and that I would have to pay £50 to get it fixed!



Is the problem because the main drive is now one big NTFS and lacking a FAT32 partition,having formatted the C: drive?

In the drive's previous state and with the laptop running Vista,I had no trouble in getting the laptop back to factory settings...the recovery disk is still the same ,and the hidden partition is also unaltered.



Any assistance on managing to get the recovery working properly again would be much appreciated.