Hi,
I have an old desktop with an ASUS P5W DH motherboard, a E6600 Core 2 Duo processor, and 4GB of RAM running 32-bit Windows XP. Currently, there are two hard drives: one 640GB HDD with an OS partition and a data partition, and a 1TB HDD with a single data partition.
My primary objective is to install Windows 8 64-bit onto a new 120GB SSD, and use the two old HDDs as data drives. If I could dual boot XP and Win8, that'd be even better, as I'm not sure how well Win8 is going to run on my aging machine.
I've done a fair amount of reading this evening, but I'm confused about how to proceed. I hoped this would be straightforward.
It appears that there are actually two problems I'm trying to solve:
1) How to install the SSD itself, manually aligning the drive, installing the XP drivers for AHCI, putting the machine in AHCI mode without disabling the old HDDs.
and
2) How to take advantage of Microsoft's current upgrade offer of $39.99 but getting ahold of the the 64-bit version, installing it onto the new SSD (rather than overwriting the existing XP install on the old HDD), and then hopefully dual booting. I can live without the dual boot, so as long as I'm able to disconnect the SSD and return to my old XP install.
I could really use some guidance in terms of where to start, and what's the best way to achieve my objective.
Would the easiest way be to forget about the upgrade offer, and go out and buy the full DVD and do a clean install on the SSD, and then re-attach the HDDs afterwards? It seems like a lot of the questions I have (AHCI problems with XP, manually alignment of the SSD, and getting the 64-bit version of Win8) might go away if I did that. But it's hard to pass up a bargain, so I'd like to know if that's in fact the better way to go.
Thanks in advance for your help!
I have an old desktop with an ASUS P5W DH motherboard, a E6600 Core 2 Duo processor, and 4GB of RAM running 32-bit Windows XP. Currently, there are two hard drives: one 640GB HDD with an OS partition and a data partition, and a 1TB HDD with a single data partition.
My primary objective is to install Windows 8 64-bit onto a new 120GB SSD, and use the two old HDDs as data drives. If I could dual boot XP and Win8, that'd be even better, as I'm not sure how well Win8 is going to run on my aging machine.
I've done a fair amount of reading this evening, but I'm confused about how to proceed. I hoped this would be straightforward.
It appears that there are actually two problems I'm trying to solve:
1) How to install the SSD itself, manually aligning the drive, installing the XP drivers for AHCI, putting the machine in AHCI mode without disabling the old HDDs.
and
2) How to take advantage of Microsoft's current upgrade offer of $39.99 but getting ahold of the the 64-bit version, installing it onto the new SSD (rather than overwriting the existing XP install on the old HDD), and then hopefully dual booting. I can live without the dual boot, so as long as I'm able to disconnect the SSD and return to my old XP install.
I could really use some guidance in terms of where to start, and what's the best way to achieve my objective.
Would the easiest way be to forget about the upgrade offer, and go out and buy the full DVD and do a clean install on the SSD, and then re-attach the HDDs afterwards? It seems like a lot of the questions I have (AHCI problems with XP, manually alignment of the SSD, and getting the 64-bit version of Win8) might go away if I did that. But it's hard to pass up a bargain, so I'd like to know if that's in fact the better way to go.
Thanks in advance for your help!