Can a external drive boot xp on a imac?

[TheVillageIdiot]

Im looking to buy a imac with 2gig of ram, i currently have a PC. I would like to take the harddrive out of my pc and hook it up externaly to my imac. Can you boot to the external drive and load windows? I think i would eventually work it into a parallel program where windows operates under the mac os, but for now i would like to have the conviencience of time to transfer everything i have on the other drive to the new mac.
Im a total newbe at mac's. I have been a pc user for 14 years, and have a advanced understanding on how they work. I know absolutly nothing about how a mac operates, so if this is a stupid question, i apologize in advance.
Thanks!

 

[macdude425]

Because of the difference between the Apple and standard x86 partition tables, no, it would most likely not work. You can format it and reload XP on it with Boot Camp if you wanted, however.