Hard Disk Crashed, New SSD and Faded COA

My HP pavilion dv4t-1500 laptop with a 500GB hard disk died. I bought a new 256 GB SSD to replace it. If I order the HP recovery disks, they will most likely not work as the new hard drive size is different (as the HP forums say) Also I have read in forums that I can use the COA product key to install a fresh copy of windows 7. However 6 characters of the product key is faded Image:...