Hard drive swap, Mac to Vista?

I have a MacBook and my cousin has a hp pavilion laptop and his laptop like locked up or something; does power on but nothing displays on the screen and nothing will also display on a external moniter.

Is it possible to take his hard drive, but it in my laptop and run vista? Not that I would want to run vista, just wondering if it were possible.

well, even if the drive were dead, the HP would try to start.

not displaying anythign leads me to believe it's one of a handful of things.

dead video card - some HP pavillions with dedicated graphics cards would overheat and destroy them rendering the displays all sorts of useless (even external).

dead mobo

(note if the mobo or gpu is toast, the laptop is now a pretty much a paperweight)

could also be a display issue, but if an external doesn't work, i'd say this is unlikely.


and to the original question... i really don't think that could work. even swapping the hard drive into another model HP pavillion would probably not work properly (though has a better shot than into a mac).

No

The mac would not understand the bootloader, etc...

Even if it would, Vista would boot up and see all new hardware and freak out.

If he wants his data just take the drive and put it into an external enclosure and pull it off from another machine.