I have an old xp hard drive with old photos and games on,if I put in my vista pc will it boot as XP or can I just access it as another drive from the Vista OS?Don't want to wipe it.

Access it via vista, you may have to give your pc permission to access certain folders, ie: my documents.

Administrator rights.

If you put it as a second drive it will just be a data drive, photos will be fine, however, I should imagine the games would need installing.

Easy option is buy a caddie pop the drive in and USB it.

Agree with the above, external caddy probably best and easiest way to do it.

One of the strangest things about this is that any files that were passworded or held under a passworded account it will tell you that access to these files is restricted, and do you want to access them, you click yes and ta daa, you're in. Vista has higher admin rights than XP