Windows 7: recommend me a hard drive, planning on upgrading from windows vista..

My bros laptop is acting up. we tried using the recovery disks, but the laptop turns off like around 50% of the process. I tried doing this process in regular mode and in safe mode. He wants to upgrade to windows 7 home premium, but he wants to buy a new hard drive since we feel like this one is bad since it turns off... Is it best to buy the windows 7 disk and try installing it or is it best to buy a new hard drive along with the windows 7 disk. He's doesn't know what to do at this point an he just wants his laptop fixed. The laptop is a HP pavilion entertainment pc windows vista home premium oemact 64 bit. Thanks

Welcome
If you pass the hard drive test
Test Hard Drive HD Diagnostic or this test www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287
Just buy an upgrade version of Seven and you will be all set.
Also test the computer and make sure its ready for Seven
You may have a hardware problem.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/31402-clean-install-upgrade-windows-7-version.html?filter[2]=General Tips
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=1b544e90-7659-4bd9-9e51-2497c146af15

Have you tried running the Recovery Partition from boot rather than the disks which are a less stable method? Dell Restoring Your Computer´s Software to the Factory Settings

It may not be too late. THe Recov disks are best saved as a backup since they can fail.

Test the HD and memory if the behavior was happening in Vista as well as during Recovery, or repeats: RAM - Test with Memtest86+
Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp