No Recovery Partition, cannot reinstall El Capitan

I'm just curious about this, but I'm pretty sure I know the answer.

I was just messing around with an iMac 2008 20" and attempting to create a dual boot with El Capitan. I was able to resize the partition and create a second partition for the other OS I wanted. But somehow, there was some kind of error during the installation of the other OS that obliterated the macOS partitions, including the recovery -- meaning command+R/command+option+r don't work and I got the ? folder icon at one point.

Additionally, since I had bootable media for the secondary OS I wanted to to put on, I tried to install it in order to get some use out of the machine, but it failed to install (for some reason unknown), and now I don't even get the ? folder icon when I turn it on. Seems there is nothing left of macOS to work with.

I am wondering if there is any way to reinstall macOS, even if it has to be done from scratch. Is there any way to get bootable El Cap media? I don't have access to the App Store, as I don't have any other Macs. Would recovery media from another Mac (say, a friend's) work? Is there *any* workaround for this, or is this unit just junk now?

I should also mention that this particular iMac has a damaged DVD drive, so installation discs for Lion are not going to work, even if I had them -- the computer was given to me, I didn't buy it.

Any insight would be useful.