From what you told, you did not create a recovery media set when you got the Ideapad. You would need to contact Lenovo for that now and may be able to do it on line. You'd need the exact model # and would need to purchase the media. It's been a while since manufacturers provided recovery media as they began including a utility on the device so that the purchaser could make the recovery media themselves. You'd need an external CD/DVD burner to do this and some blank disks. If you're successful in acquiring the recovery media from Lenovo, it wouldn't be a bad idea to make a backup copy of those. As for your seemingly dead hard drive, there are many methods to attempt data recovery by connecting the device to another. It seems you have tried this. When all fails at user level, there are professional recovery services but they'll want hundreds of dollars to do the work. It would be your decision as to whether or not it was worth it.
My hard drive failed in my lenovo ideapad p500 running windows 8, and it won't even boot. I can't access the boot menu to run chkdsk so I removed the hard drive and tried to boot off of a hirens boot cd and the computer started and searched for the hard drive to boot and didnt find it and asked if i wanted to boot from another driver but it wouldn't boot off of the cd rom. I tried putting the hard drive into a usb dock to run chkdsk on a seperate computer and when i tried to access the hard drive in explorer it was not recognized and caused my computer explorer to stop responding. I am not too worried about losing anything that was on that hard drive. There was no vital information although there are some things that I would like to try and recover.
I am now wondering how I would go about buying a new hard drive and installing all the correct drivers and softwares so that my laptop will work again. Where can I get a windows 8 re-install cd if windows 8 came pre-installed on the laptop when I bought it from best buy? And any suggestions on recovering files from the old hdd (I have been able to use the usb dock and recuva before on another hdd)

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