Vista - Mount o/s from second hard drive.

I am not sure if this is possible but just thought of putting my
thoughts across and see if this can be done.

I got a brand new computer with vista business on it. I am getting rid
of my old XP computer so i removed the hard drive from my XP computer
and put it in vista as a secondary hard drive. With Vista running, is
it possible for me to mount my secondary hard drive (XP) as a virtual
machine? Or how can i have Vista and XP running at the same time?

Thanks,
Hetal.

You wouldn't want that copy of XP running on the new system since it would see too many problems. The old copy of XP belongs with the old system for various reasons like hardware profiling, device drivers, and simply bonded to the old system in general.

The best move for seeing a working dual boot of both versions takes a five step process if you have an XP disk to start with for seeing a new fresh copy installed. You also have two options for seeing a dual boot. 1)shrink primary to create new second one for XP 2 leaving old drive as storage device 2)copy any personal files from old drive and reformat for clean install of XP.

The second option seems to be more of what you seem to be looking for of seeing a fresh copy installed on the old drive rather then touching the present Vista drive. The first steps for seeing working dual boot go as follows.

1)with all data backed up from old drive reformat it or even go as far as deleting the original primary and formatting a new one insuring a totally new fresh start.

2)two options of one simply installing XP with Vista drive plugged in and then later needing to repair Vista master boot with repair tool. Or unplug Vista drive temporarily to see XP set up as a stand alone OS on the old drive later replugging the Vista drive back in unchanged but a need to reset that as the default boot drive in the bios depending on type of hard drives involved(ide or sata or mix)

3)going into menu bar>tools>folder options>view tab to uncheck the hide all protected operating system files, hide extensions for known file types, and check the show all hidden files, folders, and drives items. You will need to do that first in order to copy the ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini XP boot files over to the root of C on the Vista drive.

4)edit the copy of the boot.ini file with NotePad after a right click and uncheck of the read only option then click the apply button to set the change. The two entries of default OS and the line under "operating systems" need a small change to each from "rdisk(0)partition(1)" to "rdisk(1)partition(1)".

5)download and install the free tool best suited for editing the Vista BCD or boot loader called EasyBCD found at Download EasyBCD 1.7.2 - NeoSmart Technologies You need to install this on Vista while it can be used on XP as well for any need to recover the Vista mbr later.

Once installed you go into the add/remove entries to select the nt/2k/xp/2x3 with the last there for Server 2003 as well as selecting the drive/partition from the seoncd drop dropdown list. The image here shows how the current triple boot of XP, Vista, and the 7 beta release is seen in the add/remove options for referentce.