My brother accidentally broke my hard drive. So, I am planning on buying a new one. BUT I want to put windows 7 on it. I’m a student, and the only discount for students is for windows 7 professional UPGRADE. Can I buy the upgrade disk and use it to install windows 7 on the blank hard drive?

I’ve been looking around to see how to do it, and I’ve been hearing that I need to partition everything on my current hard drive/os, and that I need to do a bunch of random stuff to register windows 7. I’ve just been wondering if it can be easier.
Can I just take out my current hard drive, put in my new one, load the W7 disc, and follow the installation instructions?
Or does it have to be more complicated?