Run Win XP from external HD on Win 8 PC

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bohma

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Apr 1, 2014
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Is it possible to boot up my 64 bit PC which has Win 8 installed from an external HD drive which contains the HD from my old PC which ran on Win XP SP3 32 bit?
 
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Yes, putting it into a virtual machine is the way to go. I just did that with my sister-in-law's old XP disk from a broken PC. But Windows XP will not authenticate. It tells me it's not authentic (because it's on new hardware), but the only option takes me to a Microsoft website where the only option is to buy a newer version of Windows. Microsoft is no longer selling XP nor licenses to XP. It's too bad because I have another valid XP license I could use, but there's no way to input a new license key. But it still runs in the virtual machine, just has that annoying notice.
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mbreslin1954

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Nov 27, 2010
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It is probably possible, but since your Windows XP disk was configured for different hardware, it will most likely blue-screen. It will be configured with drivers for old hardware and will not know how to talk to your current hardware.
 
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The Ginger

The Ginger

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Mar 31, 2014
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Is there a specific reason you want to do this?

Yes it is possible, you can hit F8 or F12 depending on manufacturer at splash screen to select the Boot Menu.. and select the external. It may blue screen because of incompatible drivers.. the only way to get around that is to manually get drivers that work with your Mobo.. and an XP disk and manually put the drivers into the XP HDD.. Its a lot of work..

or you could virtually run XP on your Win8.. through something like VM ware..
 
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mbreslin1954

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Nov 27, 2010
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Yes, putting it into a virtual machine is the way to go. I just did that with my sister-in-law's old XP disk from a broken PC. But Windows XP will not authenticate. It tells me it's not authentic (because it's on new hardware), but the only option takes me to a Microsoft website where the only option is to buy a newer version of Windows. Microsoft is no longer selling XP nor licenses to XP. It's too bad because I have another valid XP license I could use, but there's no way to input a new license key. But it still runs in the virtual machine, just has that annoying notice.
 
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