My desktop was hit by lightning and I was no longer able to boot it up but I was able to move the hard drive to a new computer and determine that it was still working. My problem is that I have a lot of programs with plugins (Adobe CS3) on this hard drive that I am not able to use and it would take days to re-install everything to the new hard drive. What I am trying to figure out is how do I run the programs on the second hard drive. The computer shows that it is there and I can copy data files from it to the new hard drive but I can not get the programs to run. I am not sure if I need to set it up as a dual-boot system and how to do that or if maybe I need to do a Vista Re-install/Repair or what at this point. Any advice or help would be extremely appreciated.

You will have to reinstall the programmes to get them to run. There will be registry entries that are not present on the computer the disk is in now. You may be able to set up a dual boot and boot from the disk that came out of the old computer but you will need to do a repair install at least becuse the hardware entries in the registry will relate to the old computer, not the one it is in now. Stuart

Thank you for your quick response. I think I might be interested in setting up a dual boot with a repair install if I can because that means I can keep all of my video/photo programs and work separate from my day-to-day computing AND everything is already set up and was working just the way I needed on the hard drive I moved. Could you possibly advise as to how I would set up a dual boot on a pc with 2 hard drives and both using windows vista or point me to where I can find instructions for doing this? Everything I have been able to find so far has dealt with Vista/XP, Vista/Linux, and other combinations. Thanks again.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System... Check this out. It's a free bootloader program that supposedly allows you to work with 2 copies of vista.