How to restore Vista on Studio 17 when it no longer boots

Hi,

This laptop has a bit of a history but finally I want to restore it to it's original state.

History :

I received if from a colleague who did not like vista and had xp installed (not by dell but ligit in any case). I think from the sticker on the laptop it came originally with Vista (I don't know if it was the 32 or 64 bit version).

I'm interested in running Ubuntu so I resized the ntfs partition and installed Ubuntu 9.04 (64bit). Works OK but I'm not keeping the laptop for other reasons (it's too big for daily transport) and it will passed on to another collegue at work.

I notice that I cannot longer boot in XP (through GRUB) because some hall.dll seems missing. Possibly the resizing of the partition was not done correctly.

Status :

The laptop has still the Dell Utility partition as well as the Recovery one which I presume contains the original Vista configuration.

However because of the reinstalled XP the F8 trick to get into the advanced boot options and restore the Vista software is not available (and of course since I cannot into XP and further more it would in any case not know of the Vista recovery partition, this route is not availble to me as well)

 

I think what I'm looking for is a boot CD/DVD that would allow me to start the recovery process from the Vista recovery partition but I'm not able to locate such a product on the Dell website (despite searching for over an hour).

 

Can anyone help me or point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards,

Frederic