BleepingComputer.com: Vista dead, downgrade to xp?

Hi

Can anyone help?

My girlfriend has an Acer laptop running vista which will no logger boots up. I will be saving the harddrive to try and extract photos and drivers from at a later date but for now I just want to get her laptop up and running again.

When ever we tryed to start it up we get:
Start windows normally
Repair windows

Neither of these work and to tell the truth we have just about had enough of vista as its slow and a pain in the butt.

I have a newish Seagate monentus 5400.2 60GB harddrive spare that was leftover from upgrading my playstation 3 hardrive, I am hoping that I can use this to put XP on.

We have no Vista disks but I do have an XP one (Windows XP home edition including service pack 1a).

I already had a quick go at installing XP but ran into the cannot find hardrive problem that I have found a couple of posts on here about.

I have been to the Seagate website but cant find drivers for the hard drive they say it is compatible with windows and that you should make sure that you have the latest service pack installed.

This is where I am stuck

Any ideas?
Is this not going to work?

I do have a XP laptop handy (could I try using that to install XP to the hard drive then just stick the drive in her laptop?)

Or do you think it would be easyer to just try and repair vista?

Ok looks like noone favours that idea.

So how about just repairing vista then?

I tryed following exile360's comment in this thread http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic220713.html for the neosmart vista repair dvd.

I used bittorrent to download the link and I ended up with a RAR file, Im assuming that I unRAR that which I did and I get 2 folders (with files in them) and 1 file with no folder.

In step 6 it tells me to "Burn the .iso file that µTorrent downloaded to a CD using these instructions."
but none of them seem to be a .iso file

So I assume that I am doing something wrong? Is it because I used bittorrent instead of uTorrent?

Can anyone help please?

How to burn an ISO File tutorial
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic201611.html

Thanks garmanma

So I take it ISO is the type of file that Imgburn creates on the disk? Can I ask what ISO stands for (it might help me understand what Im doing).

Ok so I have:
The oridginal downloaded file in RAR format
or
The extracted RAR files which are:
a file called bootmgr
a folder called sources
a folder called boot

Im assuming that I just use Imgburn to write the 3 extracted files/folders to disk?

Does this sound right?

I only have 2 blank disks handy so if I want to fix this 2nite I only have 2 chances

Well I tryed doing that but the file "bootmgr" dosent show up in the browes for a file list from Imgburn??????

So now what?