It may not be the fact that the reinstall or restore software supports the drive.
But the fact that the laptops bios cannot recognize a drive over a set size, in other words it has a limitation on the physical hard drive capacity it can see, and address.
After all yout talking about 7 years ago here when it was a new laptop, and likely 500Gb drives never physically existed for use in laptops.
Its pretty easy to tell if it is the cause, because if you enter the bios of the drive, and it does not report the true size of the 500Gb drive then you know the bios can not address the drive space due to its age, since a drive of 500Gb never existed at the time or was programmed in the bios firmware.
So what to do.?
You could pre format the drive on another computer, that will take and read a drive size of 500gb overall.
Then split the over all size, into three partitions of around 160Gb each.
That way when placed in your old laptop it should read at least one of the partitions and you can install the os without problems. Any bad sectors on the old drive may be ignored if trying to clone.
Please remember that you have to format a drive before you try to clone or copy anything to it.
You cannot simply Put the drive in and ask it to copy or clone. because no file table exists. a drive is in factory raw mode and has to be formatted first.
Often a mistake people make, it has to be formatted first.