Windows – How to Install Windows XP When Vista and Win 7 Are Already Installed

It appears that your OEM partitions were somehow wiped, possibly in the Windows 7 installation. They're still there, but if they're empty there's nothing to restore to. If you really want to get back to Vista for whatever reason, your best option at this point is to just acquire an image of the Vista installation environment (I leave it to your discretion on how you find one) and use the License key that your laptop came with (It should be on a sticker attached to the base of the laptop) to reinstall Vista that way.

You have two options here. You could create a new boot entry, with the correct options for the boot entry (in particular, WinPEMode and RecoveryOS). Alternatively, you could fix your existing boot entry to point to the correct location.

Most BCD editing tools don't show the recovery entries for whatever reason. It is possible to edit those entries through the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\BCD00000000\Objects\), but that could get confusing quite quickly. Visual BCD Editor does display recovery entries, among others, in a friendly view.

I've personally gone through a similar process, and have more detailed steps here. You could either fix the existing entries as I did, or add a new entry with the correct options as seen in the screenshots on the linked answer. ^{I have not tested adding a new entry, and am unsure if it will work or not.}

Likely differences from the solution in that answer are as follows:

The first thing to do is make sure you edit the recovery entry the main OS entry's RecoverySequence points to. This is the one that will be loaded on startup.

The ApplicationDevice and OSDevice options must point to the location of the Windows Recovery Environment's image (.wim). For me, this is a 169,213,970 byte file called Winre.wim. Since you shuffled the partitions, it's likely the path is already there but the drive letter is missing. You must identify which partition contains the appropriate path and files. On a normal Windows installation, this is the main OS drive (C:).

I can see HP_Recovery partition in Windows and there I can find some *.wim files. For instance E:\Recovery\WindowsRE\winre.wim 160MB file is there.

That is likely the correct image. In your case, those options should have the drive letter set to E:.

I'm not sure WinRE can be loaded from a logical/extended partition. It's worth a try, otherwise you should probably restore the recovery partition back to a primary one. Or you could even try copying the image into the main OS partition. The worst that should happen is a failure to boot into the RE.