Dual boot / Virtual HDD

Hi There,
I recently had the motherboard go bad in my old XP pro service pack 2 HP Media Center m390n PC. I replaced it with a new HP P2-1234 Windows 8 64 bit computer. I bought a SATA USB enclosure and put my old C drive in it to get my files and stuff and old drive works fine.
So now to my questions.
Is it possible to dual boot with my old drive while in the USB enclosure?
Is it possible to run my old drive as a virtual drive while in the USB enclosure?
Unfortunately, my new Windows 8 computer has no expansion slots or available SATA connecters.
It also appears to lack the virtual hard drive functions because it is not Windows 8 pro.
Is this correct?
If it is I assume I could still use VirtualBox or other third party software to run a virtual HDD.
I have some older XP programs that will not work with Windows 8 (even in the XP SP 3 compatibility mode) that I really like and would like to continue to have available for use. The reason I had never updated to XP service pack 3 was that one (or more, I forget) of these programs warned specifically that they were incompatible with SP 3.
Thank you for any and all of your help.
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P.S. Sorry !!! I appear to have started this thread in the wrong place. I was not sure where to post it really.
Mister Mike