Upgrading to Win7 from Vista, with corrupt Vista to start

I have an HP running Vista Home Premium. I began to have problems with the system slowing then it would not boot. I have several large HDD, so I added Ubuntu 11.10 in order to get back online. Ubuntu works great, and the WiFi but I cannot dual boot, and I can only get into Vista with safe mode, and I cannot get internet which is a Nokia wi-fi stick by Rogers. I was wondering if I could use my corrupt version of Vista, and upgrade to Windows 7 Premium. Will the corrupt version allow me to add on the new Windows 7? I would like to recover my old system but I thought that by the time I got a new set of recovery discs from HP, I might as well spend the money on the new Win7. Any advise from others? Thanks a lot. Hairman.

 

Surely, your HP computer had a recovery partition on it when you bought it. Did you wipe out the recovery partition sometime during your ownership? If not, i.e. you still have it, hitting F11 during startup should launch the recovery panel which would allow you to reinstall the OS and other software that was installed on it when new. This would avoid incurring any additional costs to get your computer back into operation. Of course, perhaps you really wanted to upgrade to Win 7 anyway.

Note: I'm not absolutely sure, due to having installed Ubuntu, that you would not have to take some additional action to fix the MBR (Master Boot Record) even if you did a reinstall via the recovery partition. But, if you did, here's a reference on that: http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/fix-mbr-xp-vista/