Installing new seagate hard drive

Hi I am having problems installing my new seagate 750gb harddrive to my 2010 Macbook pro.
I don't have the installation disc because i lost it. I recently upgraded to Mountain Lion anyway and it says on the apple website that I can use a downloadable recovery disk but that this will only work on a hardrive that has recovery on it.
I am basically confused as to how to proceed.
Do i need the original installation disk or can i use this downloadable version?
Do i need to format the new hard drive first?
How do I do this?
I have everything backed up on an external hard drive with time machine so once the new hard drive is up and running i can copy it i'm just unsure what to do before all that.
Sorry if these questions are ridiculously stupid and im looking like a **** here its just i went on a few threads and a video and i'm none the wiser.
Forgive the ignorance.
Thanks for any help!

If you have a way of plugging in the new drive to an external dock you can use ccc (carbon copy cloner) or similar program to clone the original hdd . And yes the new drive needs to be partitioned by using disk utilities . To format and partition the drive in disk utilities select your new drive then in the right hand side at the top select partition , choose mac osx journalized from the drop down menu under where you name the partition, click on the + at the bottom select however many partitions you want ( Probly 1). Then down at the bottom choose options and select GUID partition to boot an intel based mac. hit done then apply.

dawson1112 said:

If you have a way of plugging in the new drive to an external dock you can use ccc (carbon copy cloner) or similar program to clone the original hdd . And yes the new drive needs to be partitioned by using disk utilities . To format and partition the drive in disk utilities select your new drive then in the right hand side at the top select partition , choose mac osx journalized from the drop down menu under where you name the partition, click on the + at the bottom select however many partitions you want ( Probly 1). Then down at the bottom choose options and select GUID partition to boot an intel based mac. hit done then apply.

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Ah thanks so much for the reply!
So i need to buy an external enclosure for my internal hard drive? Can I not just take out my hard drive, fit my new hard drive, turn it on and then copy the files to the new hard drive with time machine?
Also when i patition the new hard drive how much space should the partition have minimum? I saw on the apple forum that it needs to have at least 13GB for recovery files etc, is this true?

The option to clone the old drive with mountain lion on it would give you a ready to boot drive with all your files and mountain Lion .