Is it possible to boot XP from an old hd?

[thachamp]

hey everyone, long time listener, first time caller...
i have a unibody macbook and was wondering if it is possible to boot up XP from my old laptop's hard drive. i bought an external case and put my old laptop's hard drive in it and when i plug it into my mac it shows up fine in finder, but i am unable to get my mac to boot up from that external drive. when i hold down the option key on startup only my mac partition and the bootcamp partition show up...any suggestions?
i read the article about booting XP from an external hard drive but that seems to work only if you created the partition on the hard drive, not if it already has XP running on it...

[The Flashing Fi]

No.

First of all, your Windows XP installation has all the laptop's chipset, graphics, sound, wireless and other drivers, making it a huge mess (assuming you're able to figure out how to get it to boot to it). Also, since the hardware has changed dramatically, it will no longer be detected as genuine.

Second of all, I don't think there's a good way to try and boot XP off an external hard drive, at least not on a Mac (and it will be unbearably slow when loading stuff).

[thachamp]

No.

First of all, your Windows XP installation has all the laptop's chipset, graphics, sound, wireless and other drivers, making it a huge mess (assuming you're able to figure out how to get it to boot to it). Also, since the hardware has changed dramatically, it will no longer be detected as genuine.

Second of all, I don't think there's a good way to try and boot XP off an external hard drive, at least not on a Mac (and it will be unbearably slow when loading stuff).

thanks for the input. i guess i'll just boot it up on someone else's pc and see if theres anything on it that i still care about then just wipe it clean.

[itisme1760]

The firm answer is no you can't. But you can access the files though. If you make that drive a slave (through the jumper piece) (considering you have two HD slots), and boot from the primary drive, it will show up as drive D: (or something like that).