brodyhooperquint said:
Hi there, my friend is having a problem he has an asus a8n sli deluxe mobo and two 250gig sata's setup in raid 0 array. he has split this into 5 partitions. his main partition has win xp 32 bit on it and he wants to install xp64 on another partition. the problem is that when xp64 finishes installing and reboots he does not get the choice of which o/s to boot into, the pc automatically boots into the 32bit winxp which is already installed which is on drive C but on drive D where he tried to install xp64 there is only a partial installation.
any help would be appreciated.
thanks Colin
First and foremost, I agree that while you can, it's not best to partition anything in a RAID array, especially a RAID 0. BUT, since he is using RAID 0, and data integrity obviously isn't of importance (since there is no redundancy), it is possible. I would recommend, contrary to others, that you install WinXP 32-bit first, then 64-bit. When dual-booting, it is always rule of thumb to install the Legacy (older) version of the OS first, and then the newer ones. The reason why you want to do this, is because if you install 64-bit first, and then 32-bit it could overwrite your boot.ini and you would have real problems.
A few other points, make sure all partitions are NTFS. Once WinXP 32-bit is installed, boot into that OS. Insert the CD for WinXP-64 bit and follow the instructions from within windows. When it gets to the installation section, point to the other Partition, D: For example, and then once it's done it's thing, it will reboot and SHOULD continue. If not, boot back into WinXP 32-bit and check the settings to ensure you are getting the boot menu. You can do this by Right-Clicking My computer, go to the Advanced tab. Click "settings" under Startup and Recovery. At the top you will see system startup, that is where you can control if you see a menu, and you can also edit the boot.ini directly by clicking edit next to where it says "to edit the startup options file manually, click edit."
Good luck, hope that helps.