Microsoft → [XPPro] XP and Dell Inspiron

Hello,

I have a Inspiron 15 7537. I like to partition and install different OS's just for fun. Right now I'm dual booting W7 and Mint. Anyways, when I try to install XP 32b or 64b, it loads all the drivers and at the part when it starts Windows, so you can choose which partition to install on, is BSOD's. Does anyone know any reason why it does this? I've tried this in Legacy boot and UEFI boot in bios, I'm not sure if this would make a difference or not.

Regards

Pull the hard drive with W7 and Mint on it and try installing XP on an entirely different blank hard drive.

It may be you are experiencing boot manager problems with XP on your present hard drive. Getting it out of your system and replacing it with a clean hard drive for XP may solve your problems. Try first with a legacy boot rather than UEFI and see what happens with your XP install.

Thanks, that's a good idea, didn't think about that. Regards

You're welcome. Let us know if it works. If it does there are other things you may be able to do to dual or triple boot if that's what you want to do.

Is this on a laptop or desktop computer?

It's a laptop. I was thinking, do you think it would do this on a new hard drive? I haven't even got XP installed, its the stage before installing XP. Before I can see what partition to install on.

I understand your concern. Swapping hard drives on a laptop is a larger endeavor than doing so on a desktop build.

It's been a while since I've installed XP. All I recall is that it was a bit picky about which partition it was installed on and the order of the partitions. It may have also had problems with non-windows boot managers - not sure about that as I used the builtin XP boot manager and dual or triple booted with XP, W2000, and XSOS from time to time.

If you could get XP to install first on a clean hard drive you might then be able to add Windows 7 and then perhaps Linux Mint to triple boot if that's your objective.

My thought is that the order in which the OSes are installed may be causing the problem you are encountering.

On a desktop build, you could use two hard drives. One for XP and the other for W7 and Mint, and select which of the three to boot by manipulating the boot order of the hard drives in your bios. Not likely to pull that off on most laptops.

Yes, I can try to format my hard drive, I have W7 backed up with AX64. I might give it a try for fun. Thanks

Didn't work, still got the BSOD. Oh well. Thanks for trying.

Probably has something to do with the fact that Windows XP can't access the boot device. You will need to load the SATA drivers using the F5 key during install.

Can you download the sata drivers separately?

No uefi support, no sata support, and getting that sata driver to the xp installer can be an issue when systems no longer have a floppy drive. Some have tried disabling ahci support in the bios, but honestly don't screw up your system to try an os that is no longer supported. Win 7 is superior anyway, and still has support.

Also if you intalled xp after Win 7, and linux it would wipe out your bootloader for win 7 and linux. It doesn't even know how to integrate win 7 into the old boot loader, forget linux.

If you slipstream XP Service Pack 3 into a single XP install CD you won't need a floppy drive to load the sata drivers during the install.

IIRC, XP Service Pack 3 adds the sata drivers automatically.

XP is still a fun OS to mess around with from time to time. Consider buying a slightly older used laptop to install XP on and enjoy it to your heart's content.

Prices on a decent used laptop for XP should be between $100-$200 and may come with XP already installed, although I'd opt for getting a used W7 laptop to have the added bonus of an extra W7 key if you ever need/want one in the future.

If it wasn't for activation I might suggest just throwing it in a virtual machine, what are you really going to do with xp these days anyway? I stopped using my xp pro retail before it's original eol, and put it in a virtual machine which I mostly used on linux to watch netflix before I stopped using it. I later exported that vm, and deleted the active vm as there was no point in keeping it around anymore since 3rd party support for it is getting worse. Even major browsers are using sdk/compilers that require dependencies that xp doesn't have now.

Best of all, when you tell vm software like virtualbox that it's xp it will provide a virtual ide hdd so it will work even with a xp gold disk. You can get your solitare on.

Edit: Almost forgot, there's pre-built virtual machines you can simply reload when their trial expires on modern.ie designed to help web desingers test their webpages in IE since it only runs on windows, and you can't have multiple versions of IE installed on one windows os.
»dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/windows/