How To Restore If You Never Bought Lion?

After an update my screen is now grey upon start up.
The trouble I have is when I "CMD R" to go into recovery it wants me to put in the email address that downloaded Lion. Well I never downloaded Lion, it was on the installation disc (which I dont have.)
The only way to get lion is through the mac app store which of course I cant access because my macbook is broken and Im using a windows laptop.
Does anyone have any idea of how I can restore my macbook? I want to save the contents of the laptop if possible but if I have to delete it all I will, but how would I be able to put a new OSX on it if I can't get onto the mac app store?
Many Thanks for your help

Lion didn't ship on any installation discs. The machines that it was pre-installed on were the Late(r) 2011 models, so if your model is isn't a Late 2011 or later then it shipped with a previous OS which would have been on discs.
I don't know how you got Lion on your computer if you didn't download it with your own Apple ID... was this is used machine that you purchased?
Clinton
EDIT: just noticed - your early 2011 would have shipped with a set of Snow Leopard discs.
Message was edited by: clintonfrombirmingham

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Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
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I have the same early 2009 24" iMac as you do and I just completed reverting back to Snow Leopard from Mountain Lion.
The process was time consuming and took about 3 days to do. I also reverted an early 2011 MacBook Pro which also took 3 days.
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iLife '11 and iWork '09 run under Snow Leopard and so those are not an issue. They can just be reinstalled after Snow Leopard is running.
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Converting Mountain Lion Mail to Snow Leopard
          1. From your user Library, copy the Mail folder to your backup HD
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          3. Double-click the V2 folder and your will have a list of your email addresses and a folder called Mailboxes
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Converting Mountain Lion iPhoto Library to Snow Leopard:
          1: Control-click (Right Click) the Mountain Lion iPhoto Library file
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          4. Copy the Masters folder to your backup HD as you will use it to import your photos into the Snow Leopard iPhoto Library
Converting Mountain Lion Contacts to Snow Leopard
          1. From Mountain Lion, export all of your contacts as vCards and save these on your backup HD
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Converting Mountain Lion Calendar to Snow Leopard
          1. From Mountain Lion, export all of your calendars as iCal files and save these on your backup HD
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Be sure to do all of this preparatory work first and that the backup files are usable.
Using the Snow Leopard installation DVD, restart your machine while pressing the C key to start from the DVD. Use Snow Leopard's Disk Utility to erase the hard drive completely overwriting it with zeros. (Be sure to select the hard drive itself and not just the Macintosh HD partition as you want to completely erase the HD). This will take about an hour and a half.
Next, Install Snow Leopard and then apply ALL software updates. You will need to repeat Software Update until Software Update displays the software is all up to date message. Next install iLife, iWork and all other Apple software and again, apply ALL software updates. The point is to get the standard Apple software running and configured before installing any other applications.
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At this point you can restore your Mail, iTunes, iPhoto Library, Contacts and iCal. When all of the Apple components are running correctly, install all other software and restore your user data.
I've been a programmer and in the IT industry for over 30 years and if there is one piece of advice I can give you it is this: take your time doing all of this and be sure that each component is working correctly before moving on to the next. It's tedious and time consuming but it can be done.
For me, the deal breaker with Mountain Lion is the way that saving files is implemented. This is a type of version control and version control has always been problematic just as syncing is. You never know what syncing really means and what is changed until it's too late.
Also, there was a lot of useful functionality removed in Mountain Lion and a number of things added that have no place in an operating system.

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