Can't access restore partition with alt+10

Recently the Windows Vista on my Acer laptop stopped working and i wanted to use the alt+f10 option to restore it. It worked the first time. I had forgotten to back up my files first, so i took the hard drive out of my computer, stuck it in an enclosure and got my files. However, when I tried to start up the recovery again, I was unable to. I already tried booting and using startup repair, but it didn't fix it. So I installed windows XP on my D: partition and see if i could access the recovery by F8, however than did not work either. Can anybody please instruct me on how to access my restore partition and restore to out of box state? Thanks in advance