Acer :: 3002 LMi HDD Busted

My 3.5 years old Aspire 3002LMi apparently suffered a hard drive failure yesterday.

First it refused to be woken up from the standby mode, making a new, bad noise. I did get it to power up and run smoothly for several hours, but then the computer shut itself down in the middle of preparing to write a system recovery disk with the Acer eRecovery software. On the next start up, it just made bad noises and got stuck on the black XP start up screen.

I decided to try replacing the HDD rather than buying a new computer, but then I wondered how am I going to get my XP back? I burned something recovery-related on four CDs when prompted right after I had gotten the laptop to run 3.5 years ago. However, I don't have the disks at hand and can't remember what exactly it is that is on those disks. So, my question is this: can I use those four disks to reinstall the old system on a new hard drive?

Plan B is to use hubby's WinXP install CD (OEM version) and my product activation key but can this cause further problems with Windows?