[amazinglarry104]

I have an HP laptop with no hard drive (was Vista). I took it out to put in an external enclosure and ended up losing it. Everything worked when I had the hard drive in it. I also have a HP compaq desktop (with XP). The hard drive from the compaq is the small type SATA, so it will physically fit in my laptop.

I want to get the laptop going again, so I am wondering what the best way to do this is. I have a set of recovery discs for the laptop which I made when I first bought it. Can I use these after I put the new hard drive in to just re install Vista? Or should I try to just see if I can boot up and run XP from the swapped hard drive?

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amazinglarry104

Apologies for the delay in you receiving a reply to your OP.

Are the recovery disks that you made a full image of the HDD as in do they contain a clone of the Vista installation.

Regarding booting up from the Compaq HDD that has XP on it, two problems that you may encounter are 1: The HDD will not have the required drivers on it and 2: The licence for the XP OS installation may be tied to the Compaq meaning that if you were able to boot from and use the XP on the replacement HDD you would need to purchase a new productkey licence from Microsoft.

If your recovery disks are not suitable for a fresh installation it is possible to download a Vista ISO to use, this option however depends on whether or not you still have the original Vista product key, this is often found on a sticker on the base of the notebook, do you still have this.

[phillpower2]

amazinglarry104

Apologies for the delay in you receiving a reply to your OP.

Are the recovery disks that you made a full image of the HDD as in do they contain a clone of the Vista installation.

Regarding booting up from the Compaq HDD that has XP on it, two problems that you may encounter are 1: The HDD will not have the required drivers on it and 2: The licence for the XP OS installation may be tied to the Compaq meaning that if you were able to boot from and use the XP on the replacement HDD you would need to purchase a new productkey licence from Microsoft.

If your recovery disks are not suitable for a fresh installation it is possible to download a Vista ISO to use, this option however depends on whether or not you still have the original Vista product key, this is often found on a sticker on the base of the notebook, do you still have this.