Hard drive died - any way to recover Vista?

If I'm not posting this in the correct forum, I apologize. Last week, the HD in my 140GB HP Pavilion dv6701 laptop went bad. It freezes after loading the desktop, even in Safe Mode. I have purchased a new HD (not from HP), but I never made recovery disks when the PC was functional, and I don't have a separate Vista installation disk. If I use the old HD and boot into f10, is it possible to still make recovery disks from the bad HD, and is that a good idea? (I.e., will that create problems on the new HD since I'm installing from the bad one?)

Thanks for any and all help, I really appreciate it!

 

According to HP if you tap f11 repeatedly at startup if you are given a choice to create recovery disks then you are OK to make them.