Installing an old Laptop Vista Hard Drive.

[AlexJamesNewbie]

I have a custom build PC which i built a few months ago with help from fellow forum-ers. I built with the following specs:
Athlon x2 3GHz AM3
4GB DDR3 (slow) RAM
Asrock N86C-S UCC
Asus AMD Radeon HD 6670 Graphics Card
1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD
Samsung Ritelight DVD Drive

The issue is: recently i had a emachines laptop which i fried the motherboard of in a power-surge. This laptop had a 160GB HDD with windows vista on it. This HDD had the same SATA power and data inputs as my current HDD, so: i swapped them with the intention of using mt 1TB as a data drive running as a slave drive. I did this as the 160GB drive is quicker and holds an OS and i have no money atm and thus can not afford an OS. So: when i started the PC with the 160GB HDD it flashed between Black and Grey a few times and then restarted into Windows startup Repair. I can access the HDD through the XP OS on my 1TB HDD although i dont like using XP.

So: I can access the programme files and whatnot but i cant boot the present OS. Is there away i can repair the OS from inside XP??

Thanks in advance.

 

[hang-the-9]

No, you need to install a clean version of Vista on the computer, or at least run a Repair setup with a Vista disk.

 

[AlexJamesNewbie]

do i need the origional disk to access the repair software?

 

[hang-the-9]

do i need the origional disk to access the repair software?

You don't need the exact original disk, any Vista disk of the same type (business, basic, etc..) as your setup will do.

 

[AlexJamesNewbie]

can i download the iso online and run in vitrual drive through win7???

 

[AlexJamesNewbie]

can i download the iso online and run in vitrual drive through win7???

 

[AlexJamesNewbie]

can i download the iso online and run in vitrual drive through win7???

 

[hang-the-9]

can i download the iso online and run in vitrual drive through win7???

Do you mean a Vista setup disk? You can't run the setup from within Windows 7, but you can mount the disk to look at the files. To run a repair on the Vista setup, you need to boot off the disk, in the system that has the old drive in it.