Upgrade to Win 8

I have an Acer Aspire running 64 bit win 7 and would like to upgrade my hard drive and my O.S. as a clean install.
How do I do it when Acer does not supply an install disc? I would hate to dump win 8 over my already cluttered win 7 and then have to ghost it onto a SSD drive, even if that's possible.
Any help would be appreciated.
-Mike

From my knowledge: Backup your files -> make a bootable usb or cd -> change your hard drive (probably going to be hard) -> connect usb or cd and install windows 8 -> transfer back your files -> lol

I dont think the Win 8 upgrade is going to install without anything to upgrade from.

I would suggest to keep your 7 and dual boot 8. How would you know if you like 8 unless you learn it and trial it, unless of course you already have decided.

You can either create a partition using 7's disk management or dual boot with a Windows 8 VHD. Here's help: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/3997-windows-8-release-preview-download.html

Have you ghosted a dual boot system before? Because ultimately, I want to ditch the drive I have now. It's starting to get a bit buggy.

Upgrades will install like a normal disk. You just need a product key.
First find a nice stable storage device for your files. Back up everything that's needed. (All my files together are about 100GB)

Next you want to format your disk. You can either format it at the setup of Windows 8 or use a third party disk manager like Gparted.

Optional* If you want to fix some bugs in your hard drive you can load the windows 8 or windows 7 installation disk and perform a low level format which sets all writable sectors and even some bad sectors back to 0 (nothing)
1. Boot into the windows 7 or windows 8 disk.
2. Choose language and click Next.
3. Choose "Repair your computer" which is in the lower left corner.
4. Choose your windows partition and press next
5. It will try and search for errors at boot. Click Cancel if it asks you to restore or reboot.
Choose "View advanced options for system recovery and support" after you close the notification.
6. Click "Command prompt" and type in the command diskpart and then press enter.
Next type the command listdisk and press enter. This will give you a list of disks.
type select disk # and press enter. (Replace # with your disk number)
type clean all (WARNING takes about a day for a large drive)
Reboot and continue with the installation

Insert your windows 8 Release preview disk or update disk (you can get it here)
Choose your language and click next
Click "Install now" and accept the license agreement. Product Key: TK8TP-9JN6P-7X7WW-RFFTV-B7QPF
Do a custom install
Choose your drive and click "Advanced"
Delete ALL your partitions and then click New (If you did the optional step then just click New)
Click ok and then click Next. Let the installer finish and then customize windows 8! Also transfer your files back.