unable to boot from windows

Hi

I have a desktop pc that previously had XP on and worked and when the tech support was being terminated I decided to change to Vista to give me some more time. I don't like the look of Win 8 and feel it would benefit from a touch screen to work better. Anyway, Vista would not install after several attempts. I thought it was the hard drive so i changed that, I thought it was the DVD of the operating system but that was checked to be fine (it went on a laptop fine) and I think the RAM is fine. I had the BIOS set to cd rom for first boot device and it is currently set for Hard drive first device. Still not getting past the message of Unable to boot from windows. I assume from this that the windows is on the drive and some issues with bios settings are confusing system. I could well have changed additional sub menu settings in BIOS without knowing.

In addition, I have damaged a SATA connector from the power supply and now have to use the RED data cable and a molex to sata convertor power cable to the hard drive. It is recognised in BIOS as a 320 GB drive.

I have not loaded any drivers from any cds for the motherboard etc and would love the get the system working if only to have storage via network. Obviously I have no internet connection either to the desktop pc.

IF anyone has any suggestions I would be extremely grateful - the PC is 8 years old but was working fine before I thought I better get rid of XP and put something else on if XP updates are no longer available.

Regards

Steve

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