Trying to boot from an old 2.5 inch HDD rescued from a dead windows XP laptop

[MoopStoop]

The drive is plugged in correctly and is readable through the Windows 10 file explorer, however the drive isn't showing up in the bios. I'd like to keep it to boot in and mess around in windows XP, where do I start?

 

[USAFRet]

An old drive, with a previous OS, will often not boot. The farther apart the hardware is, the less likely it is to boot.
This being an old XP...I'm guessing the hardware is radically different.

 

[MoopStoop]

An old drive, with a previous OS, will often not boot. The farther apart the hardware is, the less likely it is to boot.
This being an old XP...I'm guessing the hardware is radically different.

Well it uses a sata interface and is readable from the desktop at full speed so I'd expect it to work just fine. The laptop it's from actually came out right around the launch of Windows 7 so it's by no means ancient, just a slow ol' HDD

 

[USAFRet]

An old drive, with a previous OS, will often not boot. The farther apart the hardware is, the less likely it is to boot.
This being an old XP...I'm guessing the hardware is radically different.

Well it uses a sata interface and is readable from the desktop at full speed so I'd expect it to work just fine. The laptop it's from actually came out right around the launch of Windows 7 so it's by no means ancient, just a slow ol' HDD

The physical drive should work.
Booting from the old XP OS probably will not boot.

If it doesn't appear in the BIOS at all, check your connections.

 

[jsmithepa]

We are not sassing your slow drive, we are saying the XP is configured for the laptop's hardware, now you want to run it on a completely different hardware. Windows does not "auto-reconfigure" itself, that would be nice.

But OK u wanna try, not appearing in BIOS is odd.

 

[bzand]

The drive not booting is normal diffrent Hardware=no boot even if you get it to you will more than likely get a bsod. For appearing in file manager but not bios is odd. Is the drive writable in explorer? Or read only? Try unpluging your other hd and try booting off the xp disk. Or even try Plop just download and burn to a floppy or cd and pop it in and boot off it. It may have your xp drive as a boot option

 

[sphbecker]

The 4 things that must happen for a drive to boot are...
1. The BIOS must search the drive's MBR for an Active partition (typically by manually selecting the drive from a one-time-boot menu, also UEFI must be disabled, or your boot menu needs to have an option for legacy boot)
2. One partition on the drive must be marked as Active
3. The active partition must have an OS boot loader installed.
4. The OS must work (it is very possible that XP's boot loader is starting and failing to boot the OS because the drive address is not correct).

You could also edit the Windows 10 boot loader to give you a menu to boot to XP, that would take some googling to get going (search for Windows 7 to get more results the steps should be the same).

Or, install VirtualBox and don't worry about native booting to XP, just virtualize it. I know this isn't what you are asking about, but its probably the best way to get you an XP desktop with the least amount of work and risk.