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).
If you’re not quick enough, the BIOS will finish doing it’s thing and start booting Windows from the hard drive. You’ve got to be pretty quick. If you miss it and Windows starts booting, you can usually hold down Ctrl-Alt-Delete simultaneously (3-finger salute) which will Reset the machine so it starts booting again without stopping the power going to the mother board so the disk drives will not spin down but just have their initialization routine called by the boot as they normally do.
Once you successfully hit the setup key during the BIOS boot routines, that will put you into the BIOS (firmware on a chip on the motherboard) setup program. It will be a fairly straightforward menu navigation. There will be a menu option that says something like Boot Options; you can select that and somewhere on that screen change the order in which boot devices are attempted.
Do a Save and Exit, which will do another system restart and boot off the devices as you directed it to in Setup.
Of course, you have to physically install the hard drive first for it to be seen by the BIOS Setup.
bump. There’ll never be another XP.
Not necessarily. While it is possible to set up a system to boot from alternate boot devices, the problem is going to be the drivers. I am sure there will be different hardware in the new system than was in the old system - just how different will determine if you will be successful. And even if you can get it to boot, you would probably not have full functionality.
You would be better off doing a clean install of XP on the new system, assuming that you can find the XP drivers for the hardware on the new system.
“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.
I think it’s much easier than what Pieter said. Newer Dell computers all have a boot selection ability built-in to the BIOS (I believe it is the F12 Key, labeled “Selective Startup” or something of that nature. Just press that during Startup, I believe you need to do it at the time the “Dell” screen displays, but before the Windows logon screen appears. Then, it will allow you to select the drive you want to boot from, overriding the default boot option on a one-time basis without editing the regular BIOS settings.
I know for certain you can use this to tell it to boot from a CD or a floppy, but I have not actually tried it to boot from a second hard drive with its own boot sector, but I think it should work just fine.