"A required drive partition is missing"

I have a 2 year old Inspiron 7437 that I just replaced the hard drive on since my old drive died.  I also purchased a $20 thumb drive from Dell that was supposed to reinstall the windows 8 OS.  I did this and it did install windows 8, but I got a report that said drive partitioning did not occur properly.  Windows does come up -- but there seems to be some missing drivers/software --- there is no internet/networking capability.  I tried to do a reset/reinstall with same thumb drive, but the F12 procedure will not work and comes with this error message:

"unable to reset your PC. A required drive partition is missing"

Super frustrated with Dell right now - since I was sold on fact that replacing OS was easy with this thumb drive. Any advice would be appreciated.