Win8 alongside XP

Hi,

I've got an installation of XP Pro on an 80GB hard drive. I've carved out 20 GB of space at the end, and I would like to install Win8 there to dual boot, in order to test how it does on the machine (IBM T60 laptop, 32bit).

If I partition that space off beforehand, will things be straightforward? I don't know how the Win8 installer deals with the system partition.

I'm considering upgrading to a 120GB drive. I suppose if I did so I could install Win8 first and then reinstall XP behind it on the drive. But at this point I'm primaritly interested in the first scenario.

Thanks,
p.

The VHD method is more interesting: you don't need to "carve" space. Just install it in a VHD on the same partition.

I never tried it in XP, so look around:
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/2393-windows-8-vhd-create-boot-dual-boot.html?ltr=W

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. Still want to try the other way though. I'm going to experiment on an old system.

Maybe a lost cause. I can't find the XP drivers for this old system. That brings up the question of Win8 component drivers for old systems. I was thinking that Win8 would be good for old machines, but driver support is the critical factor.

It depends how old the machine is.

There are some Pentium 3 out there (have still one of those) that support Win8 and the only difficult part is: 512mb ram (supported for clean install form the dvd) as a minimum requirement and 1024 or more as recommended requirement + 1Ghz cpu (example like pIII coppermine) with PAE support.

It's possible that old ac97 sound cards don't have drivers but the ones from Win Vista/7 (if available) or XP should work, it's already confirmed a while ago during a Consumer Preview install on such a system.

I'm not gonna talk about the performance but very old machines are single cores and will run slow on Win7, it also depends what programs are running.

Thanks, Hopachi. I had hoped to be up and running with another old machine today, but the MB turns out to be faulty. I might install to a separate HDD in my currently XP laptop. Thinking...

I found this really clear page on how to proceed. The only problem was that I had to switch the sata drive to Compatibility Mode in the Bios in order for Win8 to install in a partition. The installation is bulletproof except for that, which they really should warn you about.

I used a linux distro - gparted - to resize the partition, evidently without data loss. Win8 is on the T60 and everything seems good (I don't use the fingerprint reader so I don't know about it).

Gotta say, this thing is strange.