HELP!! Unable to create recovery disks, unable to upgrade to Windows 7.

I'm having some serious troubles with this laptop. It's an HP Pavilion dv2000 CTO Notebook and it's running Windows Vista.

I'm trying to upgrade to Windows 7 so I can just start fresh and clean with this laptop, as it was previously being used by my grandfather. I'm under the impression that he tried doing his own cleanup of the computer without really knowing what he was deleting and what not.

I wanted to make recovery disks so I could just reinstall Vista, but whenever I try to search "Recovery Management" in the search bar, nothing shows up. Soooo creating my own recovery disks are pretty much impossible.

Also, when I go to upgrade to Windows 7, it gets to the part where it asks me what hard drive partition I would like to install it on, but none of the drives show up, not even the disk drive for CD/DVD.

Also, I tried creating another partition to install Windows 7 on, but whenever I go to the Administrative tools to go to computer management, the only thing that happens is a window that says "C:\windows\System32\compmgmt.msc The service cannot accept control messages at this time."

Can anyone help me please?? I really just want to wipe this hard drive but it seems like everything I do, something stops me and prevents me from going further. :( Any help would be much appreciated...

Yes the f10 works for the recovery, but after that then what do I do? And no there are no passwords on it, it just pops up as an error message. I thought it might have been Norton, so I disabled everything on Norton but that didn't help either.

Ok I tried the F10 thing and I'm not sure if I did it right but it just took me to the "Windows has recovered from an error should you start windows in safe mode command prompt or start windows normally" thing. Maybe I did it wrong? Idk. It was actually the F11 key now that I think about it, the system recovery. And that took me to the start windows thing.

@qhn: What will that do? How do I get to the system32 folder?

Oh and another thing that might be important, the Windows updater says "Windows can't check for updates" and says the last update run was over a year ago...For some reason it won't connect to the internet to update even though I have a perfectly good internet connection. :/ Whenever I try to run the update, it looks for it then it goes back to the "Windows check for windows update" screen...

@qhn: Is there some kind of tutorial I can follow or just some basic instructions on how to do this? I'm decently computer savvy but when it comes to things like this I'm timid and afraid of ruining it and not being able to put it back the way it was :( I'll look into the whole Linux thing which is actually what one of my friends just suggested a minute ago.

Ok, I'm going to be trying this method out. Wish me luckkk. :) Thanks guys. I'll post results once it's finished.