factory image restore...

i have a dell studio laptop 1558...it has windows 7 home premium 64 bit..a 500gb hard drive and a 4gb ram...

i was having some issues with the ram and i got it replaced...but there was some problem and the engineer told me to format my system and reinstall windows..i did that and was still having some issues..so i tried to restore to the factory image..but the dell customer care told me that i can't because i had formatted my system..they said that the recovery partition won't be there anymore.

but i can still see the recovery partition in the create and format hard disk partitions window..when i assign a drive letter to it, it shows up in my computer...and it shows that out of 9gb, only 3gb is free..but when i open it, there is nothing in the drive...even when i check the show hidden files and folders, nothing shows up...

please help me..

here are the screen shots.-