Bah, incorrect. Vista wouldn't be stopped by a bad partition. You need something a little bit stronger...

You need:


SpinRite now brings its legendary data recovery and drive maintenance magic to the latest file systems, operating systems, and hard drives. It runs MUCH faster than ever before, can help maintain all of your drives in tip top shape, can warn of impending disaster, and wrestle data from dying and nearly dead drives . . . before it's too late.
SpinRite works at a really low level (Below file system level) to fix bad sectors - or if not possible to recover, to mark them unusable (So vista doesn't go trying to partition that sector). It is very likely that it can recover the HDD so that you can repartition it and install an OS on it.

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3371586/SpinRite_6.0

From there the filesystem may also be heavily damaged so you will need to use vista's installer to repartition the hard drive. If it says there's a partition at the partition screen when installing vista then delete it and select 'unallocated space' and then click next.