Recovering operating system from broken hard drive

You will need to contact the manufacturer of the laptop. They can provide you with factory restore disks that will work with a replacement harddrive. Usually for 10 or 15 bucks

Its a Dell they are not interested as it is out of warranty

you can download win7 ISO image, burn it to dvd and use it to reinstall your windows

http://www.wincert.net/forum/index.php?/topic/8906-offi...

use the product key written on the sticker somewhere on your laptop

this is perfectly legal, just make sure you download the right version (for which you have the licence; most likely home premium but not necessarily)

They should still provide the disks. They even say they may have to call you in order to do so if its out of warranty so clearly they plan for that situation. Have you filled out the request form?

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/supp...