Vista recovery partition?

[Alessandr0]

Okay, one time Vista destroyed itself, leaving me unable to boot into it. I ran the recovery partition and tried to repair it, it found a disk error and asked me if I want it repaired. Thinking "ah, this should do it" I foolishly clicked on something Vista wanted me to, the end result being when it "repaired" the disk error nothing changed. That is nothing except the fact it seems to have removed the recovery partition, since any attempt to boot into the recovery partion through GRUB (which once worked) or pressing F11 while it's loading results in Vista loading up as usual.

I haven't got the money to buy the £45 recovery disks from my PC vendor, since I'm doing a selection of part-time courses at a college which doesn't qualify me for EMA, so I'm £100 a month worse-off, and I haven't got a job either.

Anyway the issue is certain parts of Vista have slowly disintegrated and now no longer work, such as the Games Explorer, which is empty even though the registry entries are there, and Windows Media Player, which I can't uninstall because it's a Windows component and can't install because there isn't a Vista installer, the one for XP is an older version than the one I've got.

Don't ask me how it happened, I don't know, but I need the recovery partition accessable and this messed-up installation of Vista gone, how do I get it back?

Edit: After countless pages on Google and even more just visiting related sites I have rectified the issue with Vista Game Explorer, after deleting old registry entries, adding blank ones, running about 10 games and just spending about 5 hours on it. There's still the issue of fixing the recovery partition, which I haven't found anywhere on about 30 pages of Google.