if i brought a windows vista computer could i put a windows xp harddrive in it?

Answer 1

if you want to use a windows xp hard drive, why would you spend the money to get a different hard drive with vista on it if you're just going to switch them out anyway?????

second, why would you want to use vista before they work the bugs out??? It's still unstable. I will wait at least a year or two before i get vista.

(I know, that probably din't answer any of your question, but i hope you find your answer!! Good luck!!!)

Answer 2

You could add it as a 2nd drive if you had a compatible interface spare on the computer. An older hard drive could have IDE whereas newer ones are SATA. The connectors are totally different.

If you have data on the XP drive then forget it. As soon as you connect the XP drive, Vista will want to format to its own NTFS standard. NTFS 5 is not compatible. The drive will work, but the data is lost.

Answer 3

So long as the hard-drive is connected to a power supply and a compatable cable and the jumpers on the back of the drive do not conflict with existing arrangements (ie you cannot have two primary masters), there is no reason why Vista will not recoginise the drive as a storage medium.

The Xp drive does however have to be an NTFS formatted drive and not a FAT32.

Answer 4

you cannot use a hard drive with xp on it in a computer preinstalled with vista....there are a number of reasons for this...firstly the vista machines use sata hard disks....the bios wont support your xp drive nor will the motherboard....even though the operating file system on the vista drive is NTFS as is the xp drive....you will find that when you boot up you will get this message.....no operating system found....the hard disk controller wont recognise that the xp drive has xp on it...it will simply ignore it.....you cant even use the drive with cable select....the only option is to Dual-Boot vista and xp together on the same drive....its complicated and messy....as vista uses the Intel matrix storage manager....which is not compatible with vista at present.....hope this is helpful to you

Answer 5

yes rachel,of course,but remember that windows xp is a older os than vista,so you will have to format your hard drive before you install xp again,but if you meant you want to take a xp os on a hard drive and place it in a vitsa p.c then no,your best bet is to either install the drive and then put xp on it ,or just install xp on the new p.c
you should of got a vista recovery disk with your new p.c so if you want to re-install vista you just need to reinstall using this disk,and as its a recovery disk you just place it in the dvdrw drive and the disk will do the rest
also as the new p.c has been designed and built for windows vista,which has high hardware requirements,then windows xp will run well on this p.c,and you should be able to run basically anything
what is it with windows vista?,so many people have disliked vista and have gone back to xp,well im buying my wife a acer dual core desktop next month with vista premium installed,so i hope she dosent want me to install xp on that
good luck!

Answer 6

yes you can it's not the hard drive that matters vista,xp pro ,xp home r just operating systems but if you take my advice stick with xp until service pack 1 is available for vista at the moment there r too many glitches in vista... hope this is useful

Answer 7

2 operating systems in 1 computer will not work. You have to format the harddrive with xp on it or vice versa and in order to have those 2 harddrives in your computer, one must be master, the other must be slave.

Answer 8

you could transfer all of your files from the old harddrive to the new Harddrive. i believe Vista has a program that does that. ask the seller before though.

you could also buy a external Harddrive and transfer all your files using that.

Answer 9

There is no such thing as a "windows xp harddrive". A hard drive is hardware.

Vista is an operating system which is software.

Answer 10

If you mean that you want both operating systems (one on each hard drive) then the answer is no, since only one drive will be the bootable (startup) drive. The bootable drive will load the operating system (OS) it contains. The OS on the other drive will be ignored.