Repairing Vista bad MBR

Guys I need advice from someone that knows VISTA [a dubious distinction :-D]

I'm still not 100% certain this HDD itself is ok, but will give it a whirl.
All I have to work with is windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10... my understanding is that a Windows 7 repair disc can work, so I loaded one [32 bit] and it all came up very slowly - I hit 'repair' and it did seem to find errors that would prevent booting, I proceeded, it finally [took a LONG time] rebooted the system into Boot Menu select, and I chose Safe Mode + Networking. it loaded a string of files and then just petered out... never completed, never through an error, nada, just died.

Am I on the right track and need to persist, or do I need to make a real VISTA repair disc and start over?
my alternate plan is to put win10 on it but that also has drawbacks obviously

 

You're right about the Win 10 since it's still Beta.

In the Win 7 repair did you go into command prompt and type in bootrec.exe -> fixmbr and then bootrec.exe -> fixboot?

There is an app called recdisc.exe in Vista but it's disabled. There is another version available online. You'd need to download it and assign it ownership after changing the name of the one included in Vista to recdisc.old.exe and moving that file to another location in case you needed to restore it. But with the new recdisc.exe and a Vista install DVD you can create a Recovery disk specific to Vista (I did).

 

no I didn't, but that's the direction I needed.
oddly, I don't recall being given the opp to do anything once I hit the 'repair' button.
I better look at the first screen a lot more closely

 

Done.

what it took in this case was to fixboot and fixmbr - it would at least ATTEMPT to boot and hang - then ran chkdsk /r and that's where all the trouble was spotted. that disk is not long for this world - has surface damage - but after hours of repairs, voila' ... booted, updated, sprayed for lice, etc.

thx for your help!

 

You're welcome! Glad to have been of some assistance.

You say the hard drive isn't "long for this world". I'd get my data off of it and replace it ASAP. HDDs aren't that expensive anymore and SSD prices have been dropping and available capacities have been increasing (I recently saw a 1.2 TB).