Installing Vista on Storage Drive

This is a pretty similar question to the one posed here, and in fact I may just be needlessly making distinctions (the distinction from the linked thread being that in my case, I have no partitions.) If my question turns out to just be repetitive, sorry. Anyhow, it's a pretty long story how I got to this point, but the gist is this:

I'm trying to install a clean copy of Windows Vista on a new internal hard drive. This drive has never done anything other than store media files. Will the installation process affect my files in any way? 

(THE LONG STORY: Computer's hard drive is faulty, boot path is fried, warranty is good but I want to rescue my data first. I plan to install Vista on this second hard drive, slave the faulty hard drive to it, copy the important data over (some of it was too large to backup), then bring the machine in to have the faulty part replaced.)

Thanks in advance, folks.

You can do that. Just make sure that you mark the second harddisk as booting harddisk in your BIOS configuration, and remember to install the new Vista system on the new harddisk.

If you don't mind opening the case, just remove your first harddisk before installing and plug it back after installation is completed. Nothing can go wrong this way unless you mistakenly unplugged the wrong cable...

A simpler way would be to get a copy of a linux LiveCD - like Ubuntu, which you can download freely and put on a small USB drive or a CD, or something even smaller like Puppy linux - and use that to retrieve your data. Easier than installing a full-blown OS.

Yggdrasil said:

A simpler way would be to get a copy of a linux LiveCD - like Ubuntu, which you can download freely and put on a small USB drive or a CD, or something even smaller like Puppy linux - and use that to retrieve your data. Easier than installing a full-blown OS.

Yggdrasil's solution is better, faster and safer.