Solved Copy XP from old HDD for XP/8 dual boot

Hi
Apologies if this has been covered before, I have retrieved the HDD from my old laptop which used XP, it's now sitting in a caddy hooked up to my current W8 machine and I'd like to be able to boot up using 8 or XP. I've created some space on the internal HDD in which to put the content copied from the old HDD as I understand booting from an external drive can be trixy. I'd be grateful if anyone could advise me precisely how to do this as my knowledge only goes so far! Thanks

Welcome to the forum.

If XP was preinstalled on the old laptop it will be an OEM version and cannot be legally moved to a different computer, even if the original is no longer in service. This would be possible only if the OS was a retail version.

Getting XP to run on a newer computer can be a serious challenge, one which may ultimately prove futile. One problem is likely going to be the lack of XP drivers for the new computer. It is difficult to justify the considerable effort and cost of writing device drivers for an obsolete OS. Many manufacturers gave up on XP years ago.

If successful you would be running an unsupported OS with security issues which will never be fixed. This could compromise the security of your Windows 8 installation.

If you really must run XP it would be best to do so in a virtual machine. Of course to do so you would need a legal copy of the OS.

Many thanks for your welcome and reply. I didn't realise a pre-installed OS couldn't legally transferred, maybe I should just try and purchase a legit copy - I only need it because I have a couple of programmes I would like to use very occasionally that will only work on XP. Could I ask what you mean by a 'virtual machine', pardon my ignorance!

You might want to try to install you older programs in Compatible mode. Right click on the Install or setup.exe file and select compatibility mode. I've gotten old 32 bit programs to work that way not sure about 16 bit but its well worth a try. It mode XP doesn't work try ME 2000 or 98

Compatibility mode is the first thing to try with incompatible software. But nothing short of virtualization software will make 16 bit software run on a 64 bit OS.

The compatibility thing did it! Thanks for your trouble guys