That sounds like what happened to mine last summer.
I gave the old drive to a company and the transferred an exact image of the data to the new drive.
I then restarted and luckily the failed hard drive hadn't corrupted the original reinstallation partition - this is an IBM Thinkpad standard installation.
I reinstalled from the hidden partition and so far so good - nearly a year on.
One unusual thing I noted.
I was running out of space on the old 60Gb HD and an 80Gb HD was the smallest available so we fitted that.
When the IBM installer formatted the drive, it did it in such a way that not only was it FAT 32 Win2K [for legacy applications is wasn't NTFS] but it also somehow "made it" 60Gb - magic.
I was told that there is a way to do this at sector level on the drive, so that when say, drives of 100Gb or 80Gb are the only ones available, the spec is still the same.
Cannot see the point myself, but I'm sure its a pricing and marketing thing.
For What Its Worth.
ONQ