Tanker Bob added another excellent entry in his blog: Windows XP vs. Linux:
"I finally got around to "fixing" my Windows XP Pro SP2 dual-boot setup. Recall from this post that when I plugged my old hard drives into my newly built PC, Kubuntu booted up on the new hardware without skipping a beat but my WinXP partition refused to boot even in safe mode. I finally got the time to address the Windows XP issues.
The dead shall rise... The right answer for Windows transfer to new hardware wasn't Safe Mode, but rebooting from the Windows XP install CD and recovering the existing Windows installation through the CD's pseudo-reinstallation process. Sounds easy, eh? Guess again.
First, the Windows CD would not recognize that I already had a Windows partition on the second hard drive as long as the primary drive was Linux. Rather than recovering Windows, it wanted to write data to the Linux drive and then install Windows from scratch on the existing Windows drive. No way I was going to let that happen. Time for Plan B."