My son's laptop is now a "Norwegian Blue"; on start-up the screen says "operating system not found". He never had a system disk, recovery was via a program called "guardian angel" which there seems to be no access to without windows. I tried my own disaster disk in the CD drive, but there is no recognition from the laptop that there's a disk in the drive.
If you had no system disc with it , then it is more than likely the recovery is on a hidden partion on the hard drive accessable by pressing a certain key at startup, ie F2 F12 ect.should be stated in the laptop manual, if you dont have one you can google the laptop on line & download one.