Is this possible....W& and XP related

zootfloot

zootfloot

zootfloot

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Joined
24 Nov 2005
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Skelton in Cleveland
Hi,

The father in laws PC went down last week, so he has taken the opportunity to build a new machine, however he doesnt want to lose all his email address, links, files etc from the old PC.

The hard drive is fine, we have had it in a usb enclosure and tested and its still good.

The new machine is going to run W7 home premium and is going to be installed on a partition on a 1TB hard drive with the rest allocated for storage etc.

He wants to know if its possible to also run his old XP drive in a dual boot type deal so that he can at a later date copy everything off the old xp drive and onto the new W7 machine.

any ideas?
 
You can press F8 or whatever your motherboard has to select which drive to boot from at startup if you can get the old drive to be bootable on the new computer.

However I'm not sure if you can set it up to be bootable if the old motherboard etc won't work with it anymore as you have to do some prep before moving it over.

On the other hand you can always plug the old drive into the computer and simply copy over any data you want. The old drive won't be bootable but anything you need you can take off it.
 
Hotwired said:
You can press F8 or whatever your motherboard has to select which drive to boot from at startup if you can get the old drive to be bootable on the new computer.

However I'm not sure if you can set it up to be bootable if the old motherboard etc won't work with it anymore as you have to do some prep before moving it over.
Click to expand...

XP will have none of the drivers for your new system, so it is entirely possible it wouldn't even boot. Though it is worth a try. F8 is normally for Windows advanced options. Most motherboards require you to press Delete or F12 to change boot order.

On the other hand you can always plug the old drive into the computer and simply copy over any data you want. The old drive won't be bootable but anything you need you can take off it.
Click to expand...

This is the easiest option and also means you can plug it in and leave it for access at any time. Email is usually stored on a file in the user documents [read the documentation for the email client, or search on Google]. Once you find it you can usually import it into the new client on Windows 7.
 
Awesome, i thought that the easiest way would be to just use that drive as an external and copy over what he wanted...i just didnt want to suggest it in case something went wrong and he lost everything.

Thanks for the help.
 
F12 might allow you to select boot drive
(xp disk) Try booting from it , hit F8 to load into safe mode
If you manage to get into the PC then uninstall all drivers
reboot again in normal mode and install any drivers you need
 
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