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Hard Drive has failed! Install Windows 7 on new HD from Recovery disk
Ok, my wife's hard drive is toast. Can't read at all. I even removed it, put it in an external enclosure with USB connection and tried to read it on my computer, nada. Tried Spinrite on it. Nada. So, it's gone, and I can't recover anything.
I'm buying a new HD. The OEM version of Windows 7 was pre-installed by HP on the laptop. So I have no disks. I do have the 3 Recovery Disks my wife created when we bought the machine. But when I was trying to revive the harddrive one of the recovery screens said Windows 7 had to be already installed on the hard drive for that to work.
So, is there anyway for me to get Windows 7 on the new HD short of buying a new copy? The laptop does have a sticker on it with a product key.
Steve