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Best way to install a second Windows OS?

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#1 · (Edited)
Evening, all.

I currently run an old Compaq Presario SR1619UK desktop PC; Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 4 GB RAM, WD 500 GB Caviar 'Blue', and a Kingspec 32 GB PATA SSD. No graphics card; using the inbuilt ATI Radeon Xpress200G chip. The SSD was surplus, after fitting a larger one to my ancient Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop; and I thought I'd put it to good use, rather than letting it gather dust in the back of a cupboard.

I run Windows XP Pro 32-bit, and around 7 or 8 'Puppies'. Most of these are also 32-bit; but I'm starting to explore 64-bit distros, given that this old girl is easily capable of running them, and the fact that Google, bless their little cotton socks, have seen fit to drop support for 32-bit Chrome.

I'm a long-term Chrome user; been using it ever since it was in 'beta', many moons ago now. It's always been my favourite browser. I've already got a couple of 64-bit Pups, but would like to install, and try out Windows XP Pro 64-bit, of which I have a copy. Or is this a bad idea?

The mobo on the old girl is hybrid IDE/PATA and SATA 1; it was made around the time that SATA was starting to come onto the market. XP 32-bit Pro, and 5 'Pups' are on the WD SATA hard drive.....and two other 'Pups' are on the Kingspec SSD.

Main hard drive:-



...and the small SSD:-



You can see the partition I've prepared ready for XP Pro 64-bit on the main HDD.

When I re-installed XP a couple of times after installing the SSD, I found I had to disconnect the SSD to get XP to install where I wanted it on the main hard drive. Got no problem with doing this again, but I would like (if possible) a wee bit more information on how to install a second Windows OS onto a machine that's already got one installed.

What are the pitfalls.....and what in particular do I need to be aware of? Or is it essentially the same as multi-booting Linux distros; partitioning, formatting, installing, setting up a boot-loader, etc, etc?

Any information will be very much appreciated; even after 35-plus years of playing around with these boxes of electronic 'junk', and trying pretty much every OS in existence at some point or another, I still consider myself to be very much a 'noob'!

Mike. ;)
 
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#2 ·
You will need to partition your hard drive to do this.
You also need to find out what OS can be installed in your computer and if there are any drivers available for your computer. If there are, you need to download all drivers and store them into a USB memory stick or external hard drive.
 
#3 ·
If you're not using the Windows bootloader when you install XP it will install that and you will probably have to set up Grub or whatever you're using again.

Very good idea to just have the HDD connected when you install XP 64.
Just tell it to install onto the correct partition, nothing else about the install will be different.

As already said by texasbullet I would try to find out if there are XP 64 drivers for all the hardware before installing.
 
#4 · (Edited)
Hi, Allan, Ramon; thanks for the replies.

Drivers; hmm.....yes, of course. Using Linux day-to-day as I do, you get so used to everything being in the kernel, ready installed. I don't use XP so much these days, as you may imagine; more as a specialised, standalone graphics workstation than anything else.

I guess we're talking, what; chipset, sound, video, (at a minimum) to start with? Storage devices.....and all the rest of it?

As for the bootloader, that's easy-peasy. Grub2? Nah; don't make me laugh. It's a complete PITA.

Boot up a 'Pup on a stick', run Puppy's customized Grub4DOS bootloader config tool, and it's all done & dusted in about 2 minutes..! All sorted.

Mike. ;)
 
#5 ·
I would install XP 64 bit under a VM in one of your Linux Distros. When Xp came out SSD weren't common or even really thought about and trying to find a dedicated SSD driver for XP 64 bit might be very problematical. 64 bit XP is basically server 2003 with desktop bits added. You "might" find a server 2003 64 bit driver for SSD. It will be much simpler to run it under a VM and that way if it has problems ( and it almost certainly will) then you can still boot the rest of the system
 
#6 ·
Thanks for that, Derek.

Yes, you've only echoed what several folk on the 'Puppy' Linux forums have already said. I'll probably give that a go; I've already been quite surprised by just how well an Athlon 64 X2 without 'AMD-V' virtualization instructions will actually run VirtualBox..!

It runs Puppy quite well.....and I did try running XP Home in there, just for the crack of it. Ok, it was.....sedate, was probably the best description for it; but it did run.

The SSD shouldn't really be a problem, TBH; I only have a pair of 'Pups' installed on there, and even though I use the ext2fsd driver utility:-

http://www.ext2fsd.com/

.....there's nothing on there I really need to access from XP anyway.

Cheers.

Mike.
 
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