I have an older Dell GX150 desktop that I would like to upgrade the hard drive. I have a 250GB hard drive that came out of an Acer desktop. After getting a BIOS upgrade and a sata to IDE adapter the hard drive which has Windows Vista Preimum on it will not boot up. I get the little green thing going back and forth then the screen goes blank. What can I do to fix this problem to get it to boot the operating system?

One, you just can't put an installation of windows that was from one computer into another because the installation has been customized for the computer that it was originally in when installed. If you try to do so you are very likely to get registry and driver conflicts and/or errors; I suspect that that is your problem. Two if the installation is already on another computer or is for a computer from another manufacturer then legally you aren't suppose to do that in the first place. Three, based on the system specs you don't want to put Vista on it because it will be as slow as Christmas. I would revert to XP because I'm not finding Vista drivers for it and it won't support Vista.

Ok. Thanks for the input. So in order for this hard drive to work it needs to be wiped and started from scratch, installing a new operating system and all. Is this the route I should take?

Thats probably not what you want to hear but yes. You don't want to try to run Vista on that computer anyway.