Most vendors will sell a recovery disc for a fraction of the cost of buying
a retail copy of a Microsoft OS.
However if you "suck" with computers how do you know the problem is with
your hard drive? The cheapo power supplies that come in most retail boxed
computers probably fail more frequently than hard drives.
If your hard drive crashed, the hard drive with the recovery disc partition,
you would not be able to run the recovery program at all.