My friend has just replaced the hard drive in his Sony laptop and has realised he cannot find a recovery disk or a copy of Win XP. I have found this link
Maybe, but you wouldn’t be able to boot from the CD. Microsoft do offer for download a floppy boot disk for Windows XP if your laptop has a floppy drive (some old Windows XP laptops do) I recommend that you download a copy of Windows XP from a torrent making sure that you get the right version i.e. Corporate OEM or retail. This should be legal as it will only work with your legal serial number.
Alternatively download the corporate version of Windows XP install with a pirate key and the change the key once installed with Microsoft’s key changer (downloadable from the Microsoft web site) to make it legal.
You may be able to make the disk bootable using nlite