Attemping to Revive a aging/dead laptop

[machale_luke]

I just bought an on-sale alienware alpha with the 500gb hdd and I bought a 250gb ssd to install in it. With the old hdd, I figured I'd try to install it in my old dead laptop that died when I dropped it when it was running and broke the hard drive inside of it...
My alpha works great, created system backup and am currently typing from it now, my old laptop...not so much.
It turns on and the fans and lights come on, but no boot options. The hard drive I installed IS running, I can hear it and feel it (made sure it wasn't fan I heard) and the ram I have in the laptop is good because I was using it to see if it would work in my alpha (4gb to 8gb worked but decided to put it back to see if I could fix my laptop)
What can I do to revive this old windows 8 pioneer laptop? Its a pavilion g6 by the way.
Do I have to find another copy of windows? I'm guessing yes, but I would hope that the laptop would at least turn on and tell me this...
Leave suggestions below! Thanks!

 

[mjmiller1824]

Do you get the HP splash and can you get into the setup by hitting F10? If you're not getting any kind of splash screen and can't get into the bios you probably broke more than the HDD when you dropped it. If that all works, try a couple things 1. Run a hardware test you should be able to get there from I believe it's F2 on an HP right at start up this should work even though you can't boot. If your hardware checks out good, from a usb drive you can try a linux distro (ubuntu is probably the easiest to do). Just set the boot order to the usb first. If all of that works great you have a functioning laptop. But I'm guessing that you didn't use the key from the HP to reinstall a copy of windows on the HDD. With copies of windows that come from manufacturers the license for the OS is tied to the motherboard. So your Dell (who owns Alienware) copy of windows will not work on an hp. You can download the iso of windows 8 free of charge from Microsoft and activate it with your HP key. So I would run the hardware test first and make sure you're laptop is as functional as you think it is. Then try reinstalling windows on your HDD with the hp key. If the lap top is functional but you can't get windows to work consider a linux distribution . I obviously like Ubuntu (and if you have a touchscreen laptop Ubuntu works great with touchsceens), but there are dozens of others out there.

 

[okcnaline]

Specifications?