Computers & Electronics

Windows 7 (64) / Win XP (32) Dual Boot Help or Advice

  • Last Updated:
  • Aug 30th, 2010 8:54 am
Deal Addict
Mar 10, 2010
1595 posts
589 upvotes

Windows 7 (64) / Win XP (32) Dual Boot Help or Advice

Hi All;
I just built a new system and installed an OEM Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) OS on it. I have to say so far I'm not very impressed with 7 and it's gone and broken several of my XP games, so I would like to dual boot with XP Pro (32 bit). The one caveat is that I would like to keep my drives in AHCI mode. I have already tried to install XP onto my system after Win7 by setting my drives to IDE mode, however after the initial install I couldn't get my system to boot again. So now, I'm going to try again but first I will slipstream the AHCI drivers into my XP SP3 image.

Has anybody successfully installed a dual boot set up with XP and Win7? Any advice?

System Specs:
- AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4GHz
- Gigabyte GA-880GA-UD3H AM3
- Mushkin 996652B DDR3 PC3-10666 4GB Kit
- Kingston V Series 64GB SATAII SSD
- Western Digital WD10EALS 1TB SATAII 32MB
- LG GH24NS50 24X DVDRW Black SATA
- XFX Radeon HD5830 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E
- Antec TruePower 750W PSU
4 replies
Deal Addict
Mar 10, 2010
1595 posts
589 upvotes
eldiablo, I can't thank you enough. I had seen that walkthrough earlier, but it was not what I was following and it dealt perfectly with the problem I was having of the MBR getting all screwed up.

Thank You!
Deal Addict
Mar 10, 2010
1595 posts
589 upvotes
A small update for anybody who's following this thread. I was also able to successfully switch the XP install from IDE to AHCI mode with no problems/or registry tweaks. And now my system is finally setup the way I want it, time to *test* some games!

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