create boot sector on external hdd

shaneon77

Hi & thanks for reading.
my HDD has gone into a continuous loop of chkdsk & it will not load windows (vista)
it has given me the option of system restore on a couple of occasions but upon completion it has still not loaded the OS.
I have an external 500gb hdd which i have used for back up. my question is can i create a boot sector on this HDD and use it to reload my OS or is my HDD caput?
thank you.

mp22

It sounds like your hard drive is kaput.new one required

Skill Magill

Install windows 7 on the old drive, its not necessarily capput if it goes into a loop. Some boot files may have become corrupt if it wasn't closed down properly. The disk may be fine

Gotham

If you plan on booting through USB, you're going to have a bad time. (It's possible but you need to do a lot of modification to ensure usb drivers boot before anything else. This involved manually editing config files on an iso/usb before installation.)

But you can crack open the plastic external drive case and pull out the drive. It will plug into your motherboard, it's just a regular sata drive (sata assuming its < 6 years old). I've done the latter loads and the former once.

EDIT, I see your plan now, it could work yes. you might have to have it plugged into the main pc so the installer picks up the old windows drive aswell when it makes the boot manager. But windows 7 will complain during install with your current config (will say it cant format), so you need to carefully take it out of the case first and use sata.

shaneon77

Thanks for the advice guys. I mounted the drive in an enclosure and it was unreadable in that also (on a separate machine) so the drive is beyond hope for me.
New drive and new install,from all reports. Anyone have a vista dvd? I have the product key already so not looking for warez. Cheers.

Gotham

If the product key is one that came with the computer then its an OEM key, which wont work in a retail version and is not supposed to work with Vista DVDs from other manufacturers.
Just keep that in mind, you might need a plan D.