Troubleshooting a desktop?

ricodaoren

Honorable
Jun 5, 2013
8
0
10,510
I am trying to fix my father's desktop after we believe 1 of his two hard drives is bad. I booted Ubuntu 12.04 and used one of it's apps that it came with(the drives utility). It said the bad hard drive has bad sectors and assures me it is a hardware problem. This drive is mainly a storage device so it doesn't have Windows on it. When I am trying to boot the PC with only the good drive, I get an on screen message complaining about one or two sata cables not properly attached according to the colors which only had red and black sata cables and not red or blue cables. I plugged in only the sata cable and power cable from the power supply to the hard drive. When the desktop goes through the screen message you can see a NLDR misssing(there is a floppy disk in the PC and based on research I did , it is related to that I think) and after a Windows error shows and gives you options of windows repair or boot into windows normally. I choose the boot into windows normally and the progress bar for Windows starts loading but, fails to go into Windows and reboots all over again into the same process. The computer is HP and it preloaded with Vista Buisness edition 32 or 64 bit version so, the computer is fairly old. Will I have to reinstall the Windows Vista from the recovery partition?