Slowhand, you're not catching what people are saying. Your new computer can and will recognize the HDD and access it. The problem is that the old Win XP OS installed on it almost certainly cannot work with your new mobo, so it won't BOOT and run Windows.
Why? Every installation of Windows on a machine is customized at the time of first installation. The Install process does a survey of all the hardware devices in the machine and ensures that the OS is installed to the HDD with all the device drivers needed for this machine. "Devices" does not merely include hard drives, sound cards, and a modem plugged into PCI bus slots. It includes a LOT of devices on the mobo itself, like the HDD controller chips, the RAM controller modules, the USB and COM and Parallel port controller chips, on-board audio and video, etc. If you later transplant that HDD into a new machine with a different mobo, most of those drivers are the wrong ones, AND the drivers for most of the devices on the new mobo are missing. So Windows can't boot from that HDD, even though the BIOS can recognize and read it.
This problem is NOT an issue if you have a different HDD attached to the new mobo with Windows installed on it and working already, and then you attach the old HDD as a second drive. In that case Windows will boot from the C: drive as it did, and then you will be able to use all the data on the old drive. You just can't BOOT from it.
Smoove910 mentioned one way to solve the problem. To do it you need a Windows XP Install disk since that's the version you have on the old HDD. You connect the HDD as the only drive in the new machine, place the Windows Install CD in the optical drive, and set the BIOS to boot from the optical drive first, then the HDD. When it does, you do NOT do a normal Install. You look for a Repair Install process to run. This will re-survey the new machine and try to fix all the device driver mismatches on your old drive's Windows. If it works fully, your problem is solved. If it works most of the way, you can boot into Windows XP but will find in Device Manger that some devices don't have proper drivers, and you need to fix those yourself. If it does not work, you still can't boot into Windows, and your only choice is to wipe out all the stuff on the old HDD and do a new Windows Install. For that reason you NEED to find a way to BACK UP your old HDD BEFORE doing this. Otherwise, if the Repair process fails you lose everything!
Stinger608 says he / she can advise on a process to help make the Repair thing work IF you can still use your old mobo for now. I don't know that process, so I cannot comment on it.
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