installing windows xp on a new computer

nikkigreg1974

I built a new computer few month's back. It has ufei bios and i can't change my setting to ide. my hard drive controller can be set to ahci or raid. Mine is set at ahci. I have windows xp professional with service pack 3. When i boot from the cd i can go all the way to where the hard drives are but it keeps telling me when i pick a hard drive that it's not formatted right for windows xp to use. It tells me it need to be formatted to 63 sectors with 512b. I formatted it with windows 8.1 at defaults setting. I have windows 8.1 on main hard drive. I have 6 sata ports on motherboard and the first 3 have hard drive plug into them and the other two have dvd roms plug into them. Is there a trick to get windows xp to see the hard drive right. I want windows xp on there for some of my old games i have. I tried vmware and i didn't like it. Some of my games ran slow or not right. vmware went slow at times or cause a error. So trying to install windows xp on second hard drive. thanks for the help i do get.

wingzeroismine

XP can NOT boot from an EFI system, by formatting it with a newer OS its automatically formatted as GPT instead of the MBR that XP requires.

Also please give the specs of this new hardware, if its Intel Haswell based, there is officially NO XP SUPPORT for this hardware, Intel did not and will not make drivers to support it.

Why don't you list off the games you can't play on a newer OS, then try running XP in a virtual machine insted. If VMware gave you troubles then try VirtualBox, some games may behave different.

If they are very old games, then just use 98 instead. Just about anything written in the XP era should run on newer OSes with some tweaks.

BlueSun

The OP already mentioned issues running the games in a virtual machine.

Better solution might be to build / buy an older system to run the older games.

nikkigreg1974

this is the summary of my computer

Operating System
Windows 8.1 Pro N 64-bit
CPU
AMD FX-6300 56 °F
Vishera 32nm Technology
RAM
6.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 668MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. M5A97 LE R2.0 (Socket 942) 76 °F
Graphics
2070W (1600x900@60Hz)
E182H (1366x768@60Hz)
1023MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 (ZOTAC International) 114 °F
Storage
465GB Hitachi HDS721050CLA362 (SATA) 87 °F
186GB Seagate ST320082 6AS SATA Disk Device (SATA) 94 °F
149GB Hitachi HDP725016GLA380 SATA Disk Device (SATA) 85 °F
18GB Memorex USB 2.0 Drive USB Device (USB (SATA)) 87 °F
Optical Drives
Optiarc DVD RW AD-7203S SATA CdRom Device
HP DVD Writer 1270d SATA CdRom Device
Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio
It's the 186GB Seagate hard drive i want to install win xp on. Asus do have drivers for there motherboard for windows xp. Most of my game was made when windows 98/me was out. They work on windows xp. One is simcity and simcity 2000 and 3000. I have a few old 16 bit games they work with windows xp. vmware would make the games act funny or run slow. I had windows 98se and windows xp for vmware. I uninstalled vmware. If i can't do it. it's ok. I do have some old p4 compaq computer i can get going. I was just trying to make one computer.

wingzeroismine

Well the motherboard's documentation says it does in fact support XP, and their FAQ section had this little tidbit about EFI

When a non-UEFI device is moved to the top of the boot device sequence, the system will boot in legacy BIOS mode instead of UEFI mode. Consequently, the system will not be able to load the Windows operating system installed under UEFI mode.
To work around this this issue, please do the following:
1. Always set “Windows Boot Manager” as the first priority boot device when the operating system is installed under UEFI mode.
2. Press the “F8” key to bring up the boot manager at the bootup, if you would to select another boot device.

Double check in 8.1 if the drive you want XP on is formatted as MBR or GPT, also to get around your AHCI issues you could download the AHCI drivers here http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/misc/s ... 815403.zip and use nLite to integrate them into a new XP CD.

OR
Here is the section in your motherboard's manual that will tell you how to change from AHCI to IDE

http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/Soc ... =220,0,563

Go to section 3.5.4 SATA Configuration of the motherboard's manual (Page 3-17)

Do note that you will be unable to boot 8.1 again after making these changes to support XP, you will have to install the AHCI drivers for XP before being able to change that back to AHCI. As for the EFI issue, you would have to flip the boot order in the bios every time or leave it disabled and install 8.1 again without EFI. Depending on how much data is used on that 8.1 drive there are ways to possibly back it up and then restore it after converting the drive back to MBR, but one thing at a time and the craziness of that process could just kill everything if you aren't careful.

BlueSun wrote:

The OP already mentioned issues running the games in a virtual machine.

Better solution might be to build / buy an older system to run the older games.

I know he said he had problems running it in VMware, hence why I suggested he try another environment like VirtualBox. I tried SimCity 2000 in a VM real quick and it didn't appear to behave erratically at all in VMware for me...

nikkigreg1974

My cousin told me to use VirtualBox or install linux on the other hard drive and then put wine on it. He said wine will run older games without any problems. He told me linux will read from GPT and setup a boot manger to boot from linux or windows. I can set windows as my main os. He told me to get kubuntu or ubuntu. So now i got to think about whats best now.

wingzeroismine

I guess that that could work, you can also use DosBox in either windows or linux to support the very old 16 bit stuff.

TCPMeta

By default XP doesn't use GPT however XP 64bit Edition does.

Read this

Or you can look into using a EFI compatible bootloader such as Grub2-efi

nikkigreg1974

Thanks for the info. I going to put linux on it and dual boot windows 8.1 and linux. If i put windows xp 64bit i still won't be able to run my older games. I got my old p4 computer out with windows xp on it and i am using that for my old games. I downloaded kubuntu 13.10 64bit and use that on my other drive. Thank you everyone that help on here.