Just delete all the partitions before you use the recovery media.
I've encountered a few systems like this and the answer was "this happens so folk don't accidentally wipe out their files."
I'm sure you can see why.
Bob
Have an a6300f Tower with Vista 32 bit.
Situation: I boot to the recovery disk and says no drives found. Thinking it was the hard drive I put a known good hdd in and still says no hdd. I can see the drive in the BIOS. I can see it when I boot from a CD with Mini XP. As well. Odd thing is that it shows up as the third drive in the bios and the dvd shows up as the 4th drive. No matter where I plug the sata cable in it will not show up as the 1st drive. Other things I've tried: reseting bios with F5 to defaults, moved the drive group to first then used the boot menu in the bios to select the dvd and the recovery disk still says no drives. I have swapped in new sata cables, unplugged ALL cables from the back (power, monitor, mouse, etc) pulled cmos battery and held power button to drain all power. Left battery out over night tried again in the morning, still the recovery disk does not see a drive.
I even installed a known good hard drive from a Dell with XP, of course it hangs on boot as expected at the Windows xp splash, but the point being it tries to boot and actually sees the drive. I shut it down (didn't touch anything) booted to the recovery disk with that drive still in it and the recovery process still says no drives found.
What else can I try??

Chowhound
Comic Vine
GameFAQs
GameSpot
Giant Bomb
TechRepublic