Laptop dropped, HD wrecked

Stilolos

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England
So i dropped my laptop accidentally while it was running and the hard drive is no longer showing up or has any signs of life. I made a recovery disc but not a system image. Is there any way i can re install the operating system on a new hard drive and activate it using my existing genuine code?

Laptop is a Samsung SF310 with windows 7 home premium 64bit.

I've tried booting using the recovery disc but as its a new hard drive there is no system to restore or system image.

Any help much appreciated. Thank You.
 
If it is only a recovery disc and not a restore disc, then I'm afraid that you are out of luck.

You can try contacting the laptop manufacturer and maybe they'll sell you a restore disc for less than you would pay for a shrink-wrapped version at the computer store.

Or, you could download and burn to CD one of the many Linux distributions for free and be up and running in a few hours (albeit with a learning curve).
 
Sometimes, the Windows DVD will work with the key, but you may need to activate it via phone. Just for the sake of checking, did the drive move out of the connector maybe?
 
The short answer to your question is: No, the recovery disk will not work.

The long answer is: Given a few steps, you may be able to use the recovery disk to restore certain settings.

First and foremost, get into the BIOS and do some Hardware testing to see if the drive has truly failed. If it's simply "Not detected", a three-foot drop test doesn't usually cause that kind of damage to a mechanical drive so as lhuser pointed out, you may need to open the bottom of the laptop and check the connection.

If you need to install Windows again, you have to have an install disk for Windows. You most likely have an OEM version of Windows on your Laptop so you will need an OEM installation disk. An installation disk is an installation disk when it comes to Microsoft, to an extent. If you install Windows from your friends "Retail" copy of Windows, your key won't work. If you install from your friends "OEM" copy of Windows, your key will work.

Now that you have Windows reinstalled, you need to reload any programs you had on the previous installation.

The next step might not even work but you can then try to inset your "recovery" dvd and restore the settings that were saved to that DVD. My guess, though, is that there are checks in place to make sure you put the right DVD in the drive. One of those checks might be an installation hash ID. If it does check this value, then it's going to see that you're trying to restore settings from a different installation and stop the operation.

HOPEFULLY though, it's a matter of a loose connection and inspection of the drive itself will reveal the need to simply push it back in. Good Luck
 
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