Old HDD in new system not booting Vista

[Jhoosier]

First off, I've found the forums here extremely useful while putting together my first computer. My last computer was built for me by a friend, but the PSU died while I was on vacation and I decided to upgrade everything while I was at it.

I've held off on buying a new SSD and video card for my new system, so I was hoping to get by with my old Seagate 1TB drive for another month or so. I know it's not ideal to do it this way, but I want to at least rearrange my media files, get my important photos and documents off the drive before I do a clean install.

The problem is, when I boot up, at first the PC doesn't recognize the drive (says "Hard disk not detected"), then for some reason it detects the drive (I can go to BIOS and the drive is visible) and gives me the "Windows was not shut down properly last time" screen where I can choose to boot to Safe Mode or boot normally. I get to the loading screen for Windows, then the computer restarts.

Does anyone have an explanation for what's happened and how to fix it? I've tried using the Vista dvd to repair Windows, but it gives me an error message saying it's not possible. Is it possible I've used the wrong SATA cables, or connected to the wrong SATA port on the motherboard? Any help is much appreciated.


Here's what I've got so far:

Fractal Define R3 case
Asus P8P67 EVO
Intel Core i5-2500k
8GB Corsair RAM
Geforce 9800GTX+ (to be upgraded)
Seagate 7200rpm 1TB hdd (to be upgraded)
Vista 64-bit

PS - is it worth getting Windows 7 now? Or should I put up with Vista until 8 comes out? Last time, I got Vista about 4 months before Win7 came out, and have regretted it since.

 

[jsc]

Welcome to the forums.

You are reusing a hard drive on a new build? If the systems are too different, the old installation will not work because of driver conficts. You will need to reinstall Windows.

I cannot help you with your OS decisions.

 

[Jhoosier]

My old system was a Core 2 Duo, the motherboard was Asus p5e (I think). Is that what you were talking about?

I guess I'll have to wait until I get home and try booting up in safe mode/command prompt. Maybe I can see which driver's causing the conflict. Not sure if I could do anything after that, however.

 

[Jhoosier]

Well, finally the bios somehow recognized that I had a Vista partition on my HDD. Unfortunately, no amount of repairing and so on would fix it. I broke down and bought a Crucial 128GB SSD and installed Vista there, moved all my media files (though evidently I didn't realize some of my savegames were stored somewhere other than in my Documents folder, so I'm a bit screwed there) and reformatted the 1TB drive.

So I guess in my case, the answer was, "No".

 

[Jhoosier]

Best answer selected by Jhoosier.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey