Repairing a glitched up HDD

Hello,
My Wife's Laptop Hard drive went belly up. It is a "Momentus 750GB hybrid drive. I moved it to my desktop PC and ran "7-data Partition Recovery" on it.

After several days and hours of work. I now have what appears to be the entire recovered HD approx 700GB of file data on an external Hard drive. I think the only files which didn't makeit were those that were trapped by my virus checker. I'll worry about those later.

My Question is: what's the best way to restore the physical drive sothat she'll be able to boot and run Windows 8 again? Of course I have no Win8 install disc, "Thank you very much Microsoft!" However Samsung was nice enough to send me a "restore disc" which will reinstall all the initial software (and included junkware!)
MY current path is to wait for the Restore CD use it to write over the existing HDD and then attempt to copy all the files from the restore directory on my external HDD to the laptop boot drive either the original (if it will still work) or a replacement if it is totally fried (cant be too bad, I guess, I recovered 700gb of data in 7 Partitions (Both NTFS and FAT)) .

Will this be enough to recreate her hard drive to just before the failure?

Is there a better way to proceed? Any gotchas I should be aware of like files being uncopiable, read only etc?? do I need to do something special with the partition's placement, boot records, MFTs, etc?? I'm not at all familiar with these aspects of window 8
Thank you in advance for your help...
Chuck

Welcome to EightForums

Have you made the OEM manufacturer's Recovery Disks?

I would recommend you making the OEM manufacturer's Recovery DVD's or USB drive.


or
You can order the Microsoft official OEM Recovery disks from the OEM manufacturer's website.

Thank you for your reply! My wife did not MAKE an OEM (Samsung) recovery disk but they were kind enough to send one. Just got it!
My concerns are

1. Can I create a bootable HD for her Win8 laptop fromo my win7 desktop? I have her hard drive attached internally via SATA.
2. AFTER the OEM recovery disk has been run and the Laptop's Hard Drive has been "recovered" back to the original factory condition, can I simply copy all her personal data (and registry file's etc, from the reovered files to the factory reset HD or do I need to do something differently???

1.Can I create a bootable HD for her Windows 8 laptop fromo my win7 desktop? I have her hard drive attached internally via SATA.

Click to expand...

Not from wife's HD drive on your Windows 7 desktop.

2.AFTER the OEM recovery disk has been run and the Laptop's Hard Drive has been "recovered" back to the original factory condition, can I simply copy all her personal data (and registry file's etc, from the reovered files to the factory reset HD or do I need to do something differently???

Click to expand...

You will need to back up the DATA you need.