Vista Recovery Partition

A friend of mine asked me to format his hdd and put Vista back on it. He does not own a Vista disk, and previously I had to use the recovery manager (F11). Using Gparted I saw that the recovery partition was on the same drive as the one I needed to format! I backed up the recovery partition, and used http://www.partimage.org/Partimage-manual_Backup-partit...
to backup the table and the partition entries. I saved all of these on the second hdd available to the machine. I was getting ready to format the hdd entirely, but decided not to jump the gun and ask this wonderful forum if doing a restoration of the table and the partition entries, and then placing the recovery partition back would allow me to still use it.
I simply decided to use the manager (F11), which formats the partition that data is on, but I still feel that it is better to do a low level format with Secure Erase for the entire drive. What do you suggest? Is me wanting the low level too much?


tldr: would restoring the partition table using the dd command and restoring the partition entries along with the partition still allow me to use the recovery partition? Or is there something else I need

Thank you for your time.  
P.S. I wasn't sure where to put this, I hope it's in the right section



I meant to name this thread HP_Recovery. sorry for confusion