Welcome to my world! That's why I prefer cloning even broken hard disks, hoping that at least the reinstall partition would be intact.
Funny though, the brick and mortar shops I co-operate with prefer a clean Microsoft installation. I'm positive they don't have any fancy <brand> driver packs for every build. Another computer and a USB stick, or a USB optical drive. Takes quite a long time and some of the support sites are less than stellar. - Acer has a nice feature if you're using the to-be-reinstalled computer: Since there can be several options for many built-in devices, they have an app sniffing what's inside your system. I find it a lot less intrusive than some one-click-fix-all program you can't even find after installing it.