Used HD w/Vista

[Tv Director]

I recently upgraded my wife’s 4 year old Compact Presario from the MOBO up.
Earlier in the year I had installed Vista Home Basic on the factory installed
ATA drive. When I upgraded, I purchased a used SATA hard drive that was
pulled for an upgrade as well. The HD has Vista on it but, obviously, won’t
boot because the configuration is different. My problem is that the installed
Vista seems to be blocking my attempts to wipe the drive clean and reinstall
my wife’s copy of Vista Home. I can’t even get Western Digital’s Data Tools
to reformat it. Any thoughts?

Thanks - Gordie

 

[John Barnes]

You might consider using the command prompt on the Vista install DVD and
using diskpart /? to see the commands you can perform. You should
have the ability to delete any partition and clean up the mbr if necessary.

 

[BobF.]

I think John is on the right track for you, but do you by any chance still
have your Vista Home Basic DVD? The install process can find and format the
drive for you before it tries to install the OS. Then buy a USB enclosure
for you old drive and copy all your data files back to your new drive.
Also, did you consider buying a copy of Acronis 11.0 TI. It cost about
39.95 at BestBuy. This has a lot of disk manipulation capability and may
help you get through the boot up problem and at the same time help you copy
any files you need. Just a few thoughts for you.