As has already been said, the data on your old drive is safe.

  However, in order to be able to boot the old OS, you're going to need some 
way to direct the boot process to that drive.
  You may be satisfied with going into the BIOS config and selecting the 
boot device; many BIOSes (but not all) will allow you to select a second 
hard drive....

  A more convenient option is to have a "boot manager" which loads first and 
offers you a menu of available OS installations to boot from.  XP includes 
one, which it inherited from NT and 2K, but the easiest way to configure it 
is at the time of installing the OS....
  Another alternative is to use a third-party utility; Partition Magic (now 
from Symantec) includes one, and I'm sure there must be others.

David Gillett


On 20 May 2007 at 20:00, Jill Rhynard wrote:

> Pardon my newbie-ness.  I have a computer running XP.  I have an older
> computer running 98.   Can I take the hard drive out of the older
> computer and put it as a secondary hard drive in the new computer
> without botching things up.  I would like to be able to have the
> choice at boot time of which hard drive to boot off, thus being able
> to use some older programs I have that only run in 98. 
> 
> I am thinking that if I just put the old hard drive in the new
> computer, the new computer will recognize it and hope fully not erase,
> overwrite or format and just leave everything as it is.  Then I can
> opt to boot from the old or the new when I turn it on. 
> 
> Am I over simplifying it?  

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