I have a Gateway ZX6970 (UB31) all-in-one that came with Windows 8. This is my first UEFI bios. I successfully downgraded to Win-7, but I really want to install XP-Pro 64 AND Win-7. It will not allow me to do this, and I'm thinking it's the bios, from everything I've been able to put together. Sorry to be so verbose, but this thing is bumming me out. It won't allow me to use any kind of dos-boot programs and the bios settings are very limited. It has an ACER motherboard: IPISB-AG Rev. 1.06 The sticker on the board says "AMI - Aptio, DT 2006, CJ22, 3563". The bios version is P11-A1, but I can't even find this particular version on the Gateway website under my computer's SNID, for either Win-7 or Win-8. I'm totally dumb to "modding" (sorry, and big ups to those who are helping the community like this), but is there a way to unlock some additional settings for my bios, or flash it to another that's more accessable?
Is there anything in the UEFI settings that mention "legacy" or "csm"? Those should allow XP to be installed. But even if you got XP installed, Gateway would still have to supply drivers (video, wifi, etc.) for XP. Another approach is to install XP in a virtual machine (VM). VMware Player and Virtual Box are free and not that difficult to learn. There would be no driver issues, and it's all done in software - if you don't like it, uninstall it. Nothing is altered in your current configuration.
I have some older games I'd like my son to be able to play that will not run on 7 or 8. Will VMware or Virtual Box have access to video and sound? Anyhow, I had to set it to legacy to install Win-7. It won't autorun the the Win-XP disk at all, and the option to install from the desktop is grayed-out. I noticed that some of the drivers say they work with XP in the documentation. I also read somewhere that XP-Pro 64 will work with GPT. I wiped and changed the drive (the only one), to MBR with the Win-7 disk utilities, thinking that may be the problem, but when I installed Win-7 Ultimate ( after XP no-go), the drive was changed back to GPT. Can the UEFI bios be modified to allow me to do what I want to do? I'd really just prefer a non-UEFI bios and MBR, because it's what I'm familiar with, and I can't even imagine ever needing all the space or number of partitions that GPT boasts. Curiously, the RWEverything program says the machine is a ZX4970 (which I saw somewhere in Windows as well), so I checked Gateway's bios files for that as well, and still no P11-A1.