the recovery partition works in conjunction with the recovery disks
you usually put the recovery disk in and hit one of the F keys
if you clean install
make sure you have the drivers
make sure you have an oem disk with which to use his serial key with
clear the drive with killdisk then format and install
http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm
don't clean install without the correct windows disk as his key will not work and activate on a different version