So after talking to my windows admin, I'm looking for a similar solution to a bare metal restore of the system drive. I found out he doesn't want to have to back up the data drive through the same process since we backup the db dumps outside of backup exec.
So, if they restore the C: drive which has the program binaries restored but not the other partitions you are looking at an inoperable SQL server.
I'm beginning to wonder if it wouldn't make more sense to just install the system databases onto the system partition (and obviously not tempdb). That way the SQL installation should start normally where I could then recover the user databases normally.
I've normally been in environments where the C: partition was too small to even account for windows updates without using msizap but I'm wondering if that wouldn't be the best route to go for bare metal recoverability.