Q: how can you put the old operating system in there, can you use the system recovery discs
A: Hello again, I found this question from answering your other one. 1)A new hard drive is completely blank, and unformatted. 2) It requires a "recovery" disk (or windows OS disk) This disk certainly can't tell the "difference" between one hard drive or the other, it's all the same, hard drive also needs no special drivers. Recovery disks will work perfectly fine with a new hd. It can't even tell a new HD is in it! HDs are standard. IDE or SATA, but even that difference, the restore disk doesn't care - and even can't tell the difference between them. The only time a restore/OS disk cares, is when it's RAID (this is advanced, and not the case with your question, or your laptop)