“Yes.
When the machine first starts after a boot, you’ll see some sort of Dell screen and somewhere on it you’ll which which function key (F1, F2, etc.) you need to press at that point (before it starts booting windows off the hard drive) in order to go into Setup mode. (something like F12=Setup).”
That will let him physically boot off the drive, but the drivers installed on that copy of Windows will all be for the old machine. It almost certainly won’t work. If it (by some miracle) manages to boot, there will be no telling regarding crashes and corrupted data.
Many folks seem to think that XP won’t detect new hardware an allow reconfiguration as necessary. Knowing M$ there may be some problem or another. I’m no windows expert.
I was working with a new drive that was a clean install; the old drive was still in the original machine, where you’re asking about putting the old drive in a new machine.
To be safe, you of course need backup copies of everything you want off your old XP drive first. I would always test the backups prior to trusting them and make at least two. Both new and old machines are Dell. I’m curious if the network would work.
Then you need a clean XP bootable install on media that the new machine can handle (DVD, etc.) (I’d boot from it to make sure the install starts ok, then reboot before I got too far).
As far as video drivers, I’m assuming you can get it to use the standard VGA driver and that your hardware will support that. XP is a little over 10 years old - is your old machine older than that ?
If you have good backups, and your new XP install media, you could attempt sticking the old drive in the new machine and booting from it.
If that fails too badly to continue, and you can’t get it set up nicely, you could install XP fresh over top of the old drive then copy your files from your backup onto the new XP install.