From your post I believe you have this setup:
1. A new Vista PC.
2. A hard drive from your old XP PC with data on it that you want.
And I believe you want:
1. A PC with both XP and Vista on and all your data still available.
To do this you should:
1. Put the old hard drive in the computer with the new one.
2. Disconnect the new hard drive.
3. Do a repair install of XP per this tutorial (
How to Perform a Windows XP Repair Install)
4. Boot into your fresh XP.
5. Shutdown and reconnect your Vista hard drive.
6. Enter your BIOS and make sure that it boots to the Vista disk first.
7. Boot into Vista.
8. Use EasyBCD to edit Vista's boot menu to include your XP operating system. (Download:
Download EasyBCD 1.7.2 - NeoSmart Technologies)
9. Reboot and see a lovely menu showing the two os systems. Select the one you want and it will boot to it.
You mentioned SATA drivers, these should only be required by the XP setup if you are installing to a SATA device but I believe you said your old hard drive was IDE so there will not be an issue.
Once you have the dual boot up, just update XP to SP3 and it'll then have the SATA drivers necessary to see your Vista hard drive.
Again, let me know if you get stuck
crabby