alt+f10 not working PLEASE HELP

So i'm new to the forums and would really appreciate some help. I'm pretty savy as far as troubleshooting goes but i haven't worked with the ins and outs of acer very much, specifically recovery features proprietary to acer.

So here's my story:
I bought my Acer Aspire 5520-5290 beginning of this year. I played around on it a while and i decided that since being a student i could get a free copy of XP that i would downgrade my OS to XP pro since Vista was really slow being that i only have 1gb of RAM in this thing as well as a secure network on campus here was only accessable through XP. Well now they've changed the network back to vista compatible and also i am going to be investing in new ram so i don't see a reason to not have all the bells and whistles of vista. Plus my machine is supposedly best with Vista and there isn't much support online or elsewhere for an Acer 5520 running XP. So i decided to restart my computer and hit the alt-f10 feature. Well needless to say it didn't do anything, it started right into XP like normal.

My question is... have i done something unrepairable or is there a way to access the partiton that holds the recovery without using the key combo of alt + f10?

 

Did you create system disks before installing xp. I think you might be poop out of luck if you did'nt. You might try to install erecovery for xp and see if you can create them. Good luck.