My Acer laptop came with vista pre-installed, do I need to buy vista again if I replace the hdd?

Question by Twelve: My Acer laptop came with vista pre-installed, do I need to buy vista again if I replace the hdd?
It’s an acer aspire 8920. I would like to replace the HDD but the laptop came with vista pre-installed so I don’t have an installation cd.

All I have are the two recovery discs with factory defaults the “acer backup centre” had me make.

Now if I want to replace the HDD do i have to buy a fresh copy of vista or can I use a friends installation cd and use MY genuine product key that came with the laptop? Or is there another way, using the recovery discs i made (doubt that)?
Whats this about a hidden partition? could you tell me how to copy those to an external drive and what to do with them when i replace the hdd?

Acer uses a hidden partition that contains the installation files. I just copied those from my internal drive to the external hard drive so that I would have a backup copy. Backups are wonderful things but only if you do them.

Best answer:

Answer by MattD
The HDD contains the OS, so if you remove/replace the HDD, you’re gonna have to reinstall the OS.

You can probably use your friend’s OS disc with your genuine key, because the disc contents is the same, all it wants is validation.

What do you think? Answer below!