merrymoon, That will not work. The restore partition is factory installed with Dell files and programs installed. The Vista disk would not have any of this information.  
Hello  Somehow I have managed to delete most of the files from my recovery drive (I don't know how). Is there someway of restoring these. I've tried sytem restore to an earlier point but it didn't return the files. Merrymoon  I have a Dell Inspiron 1501 with VISTA
Recovery disc files deleted!