I'm working on a friends Acer laptop, and the operating system (Windows Vista) has been corrupted and needs to be reinstalled. I tried using the recovery partition on the hard driver, but it got an error and now it is inaccessible. I ordered the recovery discs adn they finally arrived so I tried to recover it that way. It got the same error, then shutdown. Now every time I try to run from the recovery discs, it load the files then just goes to a black screen. Booting into windows (and safe mode) only gives the "windows need to be reinstalled" error and never gets far enough to load the desktop. I have some hardware diagnostic tools, and everything has passed. Now, if I connect the hard drive to another computer, can I use the recovery discs on just that drive and leave the main hard drive alone?