say i have 2 harddisks intended for win7 uefi & xp sp3 respectively, is there any viable option to dualboot other than rEFInd Boot Manager? i heard that EasyBCD didn't work for this (work for MBR 7 & xp), am i mistaken?
Would the uefi setup require the BIOS set to AHCI ? But XP would need to be set to IDE. This is my take on it so easybcd is not really going to help. Putting each OS on separate HDD is a good start. I set up my multi boot this way and simply pressing F8 ( on my Asus board ) allows me to select my OS. But I have not done a multi boot with XP for the simple reason of changing from AHCI to IDE every time I wanted to use XP. I just have an older PC running XP, which does not get switched on at all really now a days.
Just install it all as MBR. You only need UEFI if your primary drive is bigger than 2TB. If your running legacy OS then you can't enable fast boot features in bios anyway...
i am noob at the low level hardware, i will dig into IDE & AHCI, & hopefully find AHCI driver for my XP. i've successfully done that b4 & is looking 4 something new
As far as I am aware AHCI is not a driver related issue but simply a BIOS set up. To be honest just forget about XP and installing it on a new machine. If you really need it build ya sen a cheap old LGA 775 machine.
@tnx Windows XP lacks of generic AHCI driver so it can't be installed on HDD connected as AHCI without supplying proper drivers. Subsequent versions of Windows contain the generic driver. You change the mode using bios so that the underlying hardware interface changes.
Does that mean there are AHCI drivers out there and they just need adding to a XP image to allow it to be installed onto a modern machine. If so I recon I will have to hunt them down and test this out, just for the laugh like. Mind you I dont have SLP info flashed into my Z77 board, I never bothered and just added SLIC2.1. Could still test it out though. Have you ever tested this and got it working ?
During Xp install you load the driver from FDD by pressing F6. If you motherboard does not have floppy, you can get cheap USB floppy drives. For a 1 off it's quicker than adding drivers to iso...
As long as you dual-boot in legacy mode, you should be able to use both operating systems. If you are intending on using the win7 drive in full uefi booting, then no; you cannot really do that without switching settings in your UEFI. When you boot on UEFI it loads winload.efi instead of winload.exe It also uses bootmgfw.efi (I think that's what it's called, which is basically the same as bootx64.efi from the boot iso files in win8+) Anyway, none of that stuff is there by default, but in compatibility mode, it just uses the winload.exe so you don't need all that. You still need the appropriate ahci drivers, but as long as you have the drivers + legacy, you should be able to dual-boot without any boot-loaders.
Well I have just been testing trying to install XP onto my Asus P8H61-MX machine. LGA 1155 - Full UEFI board. Had Win 7 and Win 8.1 installed in UEFI mode. This is my test rig and is only used for, well, urrr testing stuff out. I burnt a XP SP3 retail disc. Set BIOS SATA to IDE - XP went through the motions and would have installed from a SATA DVD rom to a SATA HDD. Set BIOS to AHCI - XP through a wobbly. Expected really. Added the boards chipset drivers to the XP image using nLite. There was no option to add them in text mode. Set BIOS to AHCI - Would not work. Added DP MS Drivers from Tito's link using nLite. Selected ALL the drivers and where possible added them as TEXT mode and there was quite a few. Image still fit onto a CD-r. Set BIOS to AHCI - XP come up with a odd error and did not install. Will try adding the DP MS drivers in NORMAL MODE and see what happens... Any tips guys ?
Update from tn.. Sadly the link I was PM'd did nothing for me. I tried in IE and Google Chrome but could download nothing ? Never to mind. Anyway.. I switched things around and decided to test this out on my main machine, Asus Sabertooth Z77. I downloaded the official Asus SATA drivers for my board These could well have been the same ones from my PM link ? I added these drives to my XP image using nLite, adding them all in "TEXT MODE". I removed all drives but one to install XP onto. I made sure my BIOS was set to AHCI, which I knew it already was. I installed XP Pro SP3 onto my machine. It installed faultlessly. I plugged all my drives back in, including the XP one. Set the BIOS to first boot my Win 8.1 as default. faultless !!!! I don't know if I will keep XP as a multiboot option to be honest but now I know I can. So with the right drivers setting up XP as a multiboot with each OS on it's own HDD works well. Some pics ! Shows my UEFI board Shows Win 8.1 drive in UEFI Shows my XP drive - Pressing F8 allows me to boot into XP Hope this info helps
Regarding trying to install XP onto my test rig. Earlier I had so success. I have just tried the CD which I used to install XP onto my Z77 board onto the test rig, H61 board UEFI. Well it worked a treat. It installed from a SATA DVD rom onto a SATA HDD and the BIOS was set to AHCI. So I guess those drivers are not so board specific or even chipset specific. Worked on Z77 and H61, which is interesting. If folk don't already know Windows XP can not read or write to a HDD formatted into GPT. It has to be set to MBR. That's where my main Z77 machine falls down. All the drives I use, and I have a fair few are formatted to GPT. So running XP on this machine is a bit pointless really. I could not easily transfer files from one disc to another like I can using Win 7 or Win 8.1. But it was fun testing this out and getting XP up and running on my main machine. Plus onto my test rig with it set to AHCI. tn does like a good mess about..