Solved Add hard drive, storage or dual boot

[gogreen]

I have a Windows 7 Home Premium x64 desktop computer and an old Windows XP sp3 x32 desktop. The old hard drive is an N0804, 80GB, Seagate-Alpine. How do I reformat the old hard drive to use it as storage and place it into the new machine? I'm hoping someone can point me to the right tutorial.

Alternatively, I'm considering installing the old hard drive in my new machine and setting it up as a dual boot.

I see the forum has a tutorial on setting up a dual boot machine. I hate to ask what may seem to some to be terribly dumb questions. Nevertheless, I assume that both OSs have to be either x64 or x32--right? Or can I add a Windows XP x32 hard disk to my Windows 7 x64 box?

Thanks.

 

[theog]

1)Is your Old HD Sata or Pata?
2)If Pata has your mobo have Pata port?

 

[Lemur]

You can also get an external drive conversion kit to plug into usb.

 

[theog]

You can also get an external drive conversion kit to plug into usb.

Hard work doing a dual boot with USB.

 

[whs]

Yes, you can do what you have in mind. But is it really worth it. For little money you can buy a modern Sata drive on which you can install your XP which is no problem (32 or 64bit). But rather than dual boot I would make an independent XP installation by disconnecting you current disk during the XP installation. You can then easily switch with the BIOS boot sequence.

Here is a video on how to physically install a HDD on a desktop. But there are a lot more videos on the web (this one happens to be a bit messy): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIriCmOhtgw

 

[gogreen]

WHS: Might be more trouble to me than it's worth, but at least now I have a direction.

theog: I think it's a SATA.

Lemur: Interesting alternative. I'll look into that!

Thanks, all for the advice!