Boot from XP on Vista machine?

Question

My XP box fried its motherboard so I moved the hard drive to a brand new machine with preinstalled Viata (not my choice it was an emergency and I need data off the XP HDD). I've been trying to install all my software on the Vista machine but it is a major pain. My s/w is all legit but many of the vendors don't yet have drivers released. My question is can I change the boot process to boot from the XP HDD instead of the Vista HDD and, if so, how?

Answer 1

Since the new PC probably have different hardware than your old PC, just booting from the old Harddisk will almost certainly not work. You need to do a repair install of XP.

Make sure you have both the XP and Vista Discs.

Boot from the XP CD with both harddisks installed and start the Setup.
XP will ask you if you want to repair your install from the Recovery console. Choose not to, by pressing Enter.

After a while Setup will find your old XP install and ask you if you want to repair that. Press R to let it repair.

This will erase the Vista Boot area. Don't worry, this is OK and we will repair this after Windows XP is up and running again.

After XP is installed, boot from the Vista DVD. Choose to repair the Bootoptions.
After this you will have a nice menu, that will ask you if you want to boot into Vista or into older Windows installations (your XP).

Answer 2

What I would do If I had no choice, because it is probably safer just to put in an XP machine. When the computer starts (not the OS) got to the BIOS and find boot devices. Switch the XP hard drive to the primary boot drive and put the vista as a secondary. Also, if the XP drive was just a storage drive and not a boot drive then you definitely are stuck. Also, before you remove the XP drive switch the vista drive back to the primary boot device.

Answer 3

set the xp hd as the master and the vista as slave.