Hi, my first post. I am sure that this has been asked before. I have ordered a new pc as my old one gave up the ghost. The new pc has a sata hard drive with Vista home premium. I would like to install my old ide XP boot drive too. I have the XP cd. Is it reasonably easy for me to choose to boot from the old drive when necessary and will I be able to reactivate my old XP with my new mother board?
Many thanks in advance, Matt.

Welcome to Techspot!

Is the old HDD a SATA drive? Why do you still want to run XP or do just want to recover files off the old drive? If you still want to install XP you need to buy another HDD that is SATA. The way you're suppose to do it is install XP first then have VISTA install second..

No, my old drive is ide but my new motherboard will support 2 ide drives. I want to keep the XP option because all my old programmes are installed on that drive and I want to ease the transition. If I can open my apps. on the old drive and they will just run in the new environment then that will be fine. I suspect that that will not be the case so I would like to be able to boot from both for a transitional period. Will i be able to do that?
Thanks in advance. Matt.

just for a transfer of data get an ide to usb hard drive case, place the ide drive in the case, u can then just drag all that u need off of the ide drive to the Vista machine.

Thanks for that. I realise I can do that, or save myself the money and stick the drive in the box. What I want to be able to do is boot from both the drives. All my apps are installed on the xp drive. Just adding it as another drive will not allow me to run those apps. I will try to work it out when I get the new box on Wednesday.
Matt.

Nope. Not unless its the same hardware. You may be able to get it to work by doing a repair install of XP, that is about your only shot at running the programs already installed.