Since you have a Dell you may have made a Dell Recovery drive. That drive may not boot normally but needs to be used with the DELL recovery options, which is an F1 key or something similar. It would probably show "SYSRECOVERY" for a label.
If you made the Recovery Drive using Windows, it should boot and allow you do to a Factory Reset.
A system Image recovery is a different thing and would have required you to create that backup at some prior point. It sounds like you need to use the Reset option. That will use the Factory Image from the .swm files.
Did you replace the drive with the same size, or possibly larger?