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I'm trying to use a SATA II hard drive on Toshiba Satellite notebook. The hard drive has vista installed on it from another notebook. After inserting the hard drive, the boot starts.. shows "Microsoft windows" the progress bar, and reboots, in a loop.

The existing hard drive is SATA with Windows XP on it. The replacement one is SATA II with Windows Vista on it. I wanna troubleshoot. But, don't know where to start. Any help is much appreciated!!

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The hard drive has vista installed on it from another notebook.

Unless the other notebook was identical to the Toshiba notebook you are now trying to boot the drive in, there is no reason you should expect this to work. You can't simply move a Window's installation from one hardware platform to another and expect it to work. The low level operating system drivers almost certainly need to be replaced.

If this was Windows XP I would tell you to do a repair install. Since this is Vista, I'm not sure what you should do. Have you tried doing an "upgrade" install of Vista? That is, do a Vista install that will preserve you application program installs and settings?

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    +1. It's most definitely a driver issue. My guess is that it's generating a BSOD trying to load drivers for hardware it thinks should be there (from the laptop the drive was taken from) and automatically rebooting.
    – joeqwerty
    Commented Jun 17, 2010 at 3:34

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