Hi Lauren,

It depends on the age of that laptop and whether ot not there are capacity restrictions for the size of hard drives it will accept. If it's an older laptop which will not recognise the larger capacity hard drives which are sold nowadays you may find it difficult to obtain a suitable replacement.

But don't jump to conclusions before you try installing with a workable CD. A possibility would be to try borrowing a Windows CD from someone and seeing if that will install. You'd need to download device drivers for the laptop from Sony's website were you to install that way, and it would not reload any bundled software.