[JmHut]

I hope someone can tell me to either give up or that there is a semi-simple solution because I have exhauted all my searching skills.

Long story short. My sister's old PC died. We bought her a refurbished HP, with sata drive connections not IDE. I don't have the specs on hers at present as she live in a different city but I don't think that it really matters. I still have her old HD(IDE) with everything including XP intact.

I have read all kinds of setting up a new install of XP and dual booting with Vista but she doesn't want to lose anything on her old HD. We just want to be able to use both OS on this one PC.

I installed the old drive as a slave on my Windows PC and everything appears to be there but of course not everything works although oddly some programs do. Of course, the problem I imagine, is that the old HD/and XP are not set to be used with the new Hardware/Mobo etc. I get that and understand that it is probably impossible to get this old hd, with programs, working in the new PC but I have to ask.

If I image that drive could I move it into a second partition on the new vista PC and dual boot, after installing the third party bootloader?

Thanks for any help.
jmh