External Hard drive question
 

I have a question re: external hard drives. I recently had an older computer crash, but the hard drive (160 Gig) is fine. A friend installed it on a spare computer and it works great. I would like to get a hard drive enclosure and make it an external drive for my new HP computer running Vista. The old drive has Windows XP installed. Does anyone know if there is any conflict or compatabilty issues involved in attempting this?

Depending on your computer you may not even be able to boot off the usb drive, you would have to check in your BIOS boot order for a USB option.
There is no problem, even if you are running a dual boot this way, one OS (unless you tell it to) does not modify the files of another OS on purpose.