Dual Booting XP and Vista File Access W/ Separate HDDs?

[AnonymousPerson]

Is it possible to add a hard drive with XP installed on it to a computer hard drive with Vista installed on it (assuming there is room and that I know how to), and still access the drive that I'm not using at the time?

For example, if I booted to the XP drive, could I still access files on the Vista drive?
Would I have to change any settings in Vista?

Thanks for any help, sorry if this is in the wrong section.

[Quantos]

As long as you can find drivers for both operating systems for your computer you can.

[patio]

The chances of just swapping an XP HDD into a different system than XP was installed on and it working correctly are slim to none.
This is by design.

However it does not need to be able to boot to XP for you to access the files on it normally...
Simply hook it up as a Slave drive and you can use it...

Not sure if this is what you are asking here though

[AnonymousPerson]

Actually, I was asking about the reverse; booting to the XP drive and accessing the files on the Vista drive. Would it help if I changed the Vista drive to the slave drive and set the XP drive as the master drive?

[soybean]

Assuming you've properly setup your dual boot configuration with two physical hard drives involved, you can access user data files created while running one OS during a session running the other OS.  Does that answer your question? 

If you have your dual boot setup properly done, there's no need to change master/slave settings.

[Geek-9pm]

Actually, I was asking about the reverse; booting to the XP drive and accessing the files on the Vista drive. Would it help if I changed the Vista drive to the slave drive and set the XP drive as the master drive?

You need to look in the BIOS options and see what can be done. The BIOS may have an option to 'swap' the boot drive. On some PCs there may be th option to boot from one of five different devices. Or more.
About the files system. Both XP and Vista use the same NTFS file system. Right now I am on my XP system, but I can peak into both drives and all partitions. But some files I can not easily modify, they are protected by the other system.

So yes, put your XP system into the PC. The limitation is if the XP system was working earlier on that very same PC. If not, you may have a hard time. It has something to do with HAL. Different PCs have different HAL files.
The keyword HAL is in the CH database if you wait more info.

[AnonymousPerson]

Ok, I'll try that. Thanks for the help!

[patio]

If XP wasn't installed to that drive on this exact machine you are going to have issues...