Another Dual Boot Question

I have two physical drives, and intend to install a different version (different language) of Windows XP on each. If at some later time, I remove the secondary drive and install it as the only drive in another machine, will it boot?

If not, is there something I can do when I first set up the secondary drive, which will allow it to boot later?

Or, is there something I can add after the fact (without re-formatting the disk) to make it bootable?

Its possible that the drive will boot, but xp doesn't really take being moved very well. There are too many registry entries and drivers that may not be installed.
http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...b;EN-US;Q271965 and its linked pages give some info about possible work arounds, but it can be a big hassle.
Why don't you format the drive, and install the 2 versions of xp on the new computer afterwards?

Let me modify my question a bit. Let's say I totally remove the first drive and now install what was my second drive as the only drive, in the same machine. Therefore, the hardware will be the same. (The reasons I might want to do this are complex, so I won't go into it here.)

The question is, does that second drive have a boot.ini file and whatever accesses it, so that it will boot by itself?

the second drive with xp will not boot on it's own in any machine, the boot record for the operating system exist on the C: drive with the first os installed, either drive can be made to boot in other machines. just use the windows xp installation disk to do a repair, now depending on what version of xp we are talking here will you have trouble, if you have a multi license this will not be a problem. if you have a upgrade, or retail xp home or pro, you will have to activate it again by contacting microsoft and paying the fee for secondary license.

Why not using the disk that has to remain in place as primary master with the version of Windows that you want to keep? Of coarse the other disk has to be reinstalled after removing unless it's a slave in the other one too.