Hello everyone. Sorry if this have been posted before, if so could anyone link to it?

Anyway I just got a Vista Home Premium from Compaq. It's setup and everything is running fine but I have all these unneeded functions and programs that I would like to remove. Unfortunately my laptop came with a recover hard drive partition instead of a CD. But on top of that this hard drive partition is locked!
I would like to customize my own Vista installation but I can't see the system files, so I was wondering if it were possible to open this partition and get a copy of the Vista system files for my own vista installation? It seems it is not a program but rather a rootkit that makes sure that I don't open the folders on the recover partition. Any way to remove and evade this thing? Sorry don't have the biggest knowledge on this...

tl;dr
Possible to open a recover hard drive partition?

Maybe, this worked for me on a XP recovery partition by Dell. Go to Command prompt and type in icacls on Vista and you'll see what I'm doing.

EDIT: Right click and choose properties and look who has the permissions on that drive first thing so you can restore that if you need to.

echo y| icacls E:\ /T /E /G Everyone:F
E:\ should be your path to the recovery partition and basically I'm telling it to Tell it Yes for everything(ECHO Y|) set permissions to E(Everyone) FULL

basically the recovery partitions are so full of the crap to be unuseable so might want to start with an image from somewhere(download), all you need is your key and some basic files straight off your working PC