Hello all.
My problem is that I want to dual boot xp and xp 64. I run xp and win 2000 in a dual boot situation at the moment but never use 2000 at all now. I want to utilise of all of my ram so I want to install xp64. I have read that there are problems running xp32 with xp 64 as regards startup/boot. I want to install xp64 onto a new drive by itself. Is this possible with my current setup and if so what problems, if any, should I be aware of?
I run a dual processor msi k8n master 2far motherboard with 2 opteron 285's with 6 gig of ram.

thanks in advanceI have XP32, XP 64, and Vista Ultimate x64 triple booting on my laptop with no issues.

It's easy, if you start with a clean drive. always go from oldest OS to newest OS; in my case, I installed XP-32 first, XP-64 second (which recognized XP-32 and installed a boot menu) and lastly Vista x64, which found the existing boot loader and replaced it with the vista bcd.

so now, when I start, I have a choice of "Windows Vista" or Earlier Version of Microsoft Windows", selecting the latter runs the same boot loader installed by XP64.



In your case, starting from a wiped drive you could install XP 32-bit onto one partition/HD, and then XP 64-bit onto ANOTHER afterwards. XP64 would setup a boot menu for you.

If on the other hand you just want XP 64-bit, then it's even easier, just install from a clean drive.

I cannot see any further issues, except perhaps driver issues. For the most part, it just takes the proper "google-fu" to find the drivers.

one last thing though- you might want to try to search for xp64 drivers beforehand, and then burn it to a CD; at the very least I'd get your network drivers and motherboard chipset drivers, to start.thanks for the response.
Hopefully mine will be as painless an install as yours.
And i'll definitely check for the 64bit drivers this weekend before I try the install.
If you don't hear from me, all went well. Fingers crossed

thanks

Hello again.
Well I didn't get to INSTALLING XP64 yet!

I had a serious error on my system last night and it took me till about 3am to get it up again ...but I don't really know what I did or what really caused the error.
The crash/freeze occured when I had booted into my XP system as normal and just after the desktop appeared I opened Nero media player and clicked on the button to open the music folder so I could choose something to listen too - and the system froze. I then switched off and rebooted after about 20 secs. It would get to just before the screen to logon with your password and it would flash up a blue screen too fast to see and it would either hang or restart.
It would boot into XP in safe mode but I'm not too sure what that proved and I could also get into Win2000 but not XP. I had the new hard drive powered on but not formatted and the new ram was in place too so it was running 6 gig instead of the usual 4. I disconnected the new hard drive and removed the newly purchased ram. This did not initially fix the problem.
I then thought to disable onboard audio SINCE it was an audio program that caused the problem ( or so it seemed to me ) and I got it too boot but only after several tries.

The following is the error from the first night after I got it too boot:-
Event Type: Error
Event Source: System Error
Event Category: (102)
Event ID: 1003
Date: 29/07/2009
Time: 23:54:31
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
Error code 1000000a, parameter1 00000000, parameter2 00000002, parameter3 00000001, parameter4 8052191c.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 53 79 73 74 65 6d 20 45 System E
0008: 72 72 6f 72 20 20 45 72 rror Er
0010: 72 6f 72 20 63 6f 64 65 ror code
0018: 20 31 30 30 30 30 30 30 1000000
0020: 61 20 20 50 61 72 61 6d a Param
0028: 65 74 65 72 73 20 30 30 eters 00
0030: 30 30 30 30 30 30 2c 20 000000,
0038: 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 32 00000002
0040: 2c 20 30 30 30 30 30 30 , 000000
0048: 30 31 2c 20 38 30 35 32 01, 8052
0050: 31 39 31 63 191c



Event Type: Error
Event Source: System Error
Event Category: (102)
Event ID: 1003
Date: 29/07/2009
Time: 23:50:32
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
Error code 0000009c, parameter1 00000004, parameter2 8054d5f0, parameter3 b6612001, parameter4 ce080813.

Data:
0000: 53 79 73 74 65 6d 20 45 System E
0008: 72 72 6f 72 20 20 45 72 rror Er
0010: 72 6f 72 20 63 6f 64 65 ror code
0018: 20 30 30 30 30 30 30 39 0000009
0020: 63 20 20 50 61 72 61 6d c Param
0028: 65 74 65 72 73 20 30 30 eters 00
0030: 30 30 30 30 30 34 2c 20 000004,
0038: 38 30 35 34 64 35 66 30 8054d5f0
0040: 2c 20 62 36 36 31 32 30 , b66120
0048: 30 31 2c 20 63 65 30 38 01, ce08
0050: 30 38 31 33 0813


This is the following evening....
I re-installed the new ram and it booted up fine first time. Then I restarted and went into the bios and enabled onboard audio and after the reboot I got a blue screen again with the error message, " IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL ". Can somebody explain what this error MEANS please.

I then removed the new ram from slots 5 and 6 again and disabled the audio.

I got a different error window when I finally got it to boot into XP after this.
It read:-
error signature
BCCode : 9c BCP1 : 00000004 BCP2 : 8054D5F0 BCP3 :

F6062001
BCP4 : BA080813 OSVer : 5_1_2600 SP : 2_0 Product :

256_1

The error window also states that these files :-
D:\DOCUME~1\David\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER8f6f.dir00\Mini073009-01.

dmp
D:\DOCUME~1\David\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER8f6f.dir00\sysdata.xml

- will be included in the error message but annoyingly I cannot find them on my system.

I have not had any blue screens since I built this machine 2 years ago and everything has worked without a hitch.

Can somebody with superior knowledge please tell me what is going on!!



thanks.



MSI K8N Master2-FAR running Dual Opteron 285's
250 gig hard drive
4 gig ram. Kingston KVR400D8R3A/1G
XP 32bit sp2 and Win2K
NV Quadro FX 3400