hard drive crash

My sons lap top hard drive has crashed and the company is sending a replacement hard drive. He has the recovery discs for windows and of course he did not back up anything. After installing the new hard drive what is the procedure to get the computer back up and running? Do we need to buy a new windows program (it came pre installed on the computer so we dont have the original) or will the recovery discs be all thats needed to install the operating system? any suggestions on recovery of data from the old hard drive?