Hi all
I've been trying for a couple of weeks to get WinXP running on my i-Opener with an NTFS filsystem. SO far I've been unsuccessful; I thought I would share what hasn't worked to perhaps prevent others from as much pain as I've had.
I have an 18Gb drive (and 256Mb RAM). I want to split this between Windows (about 12Gb) and FreeBSD, plus a small FAT partition at the end for sharing files between the two (as FreeBSD can only mount NTFS read-only).
I diod manage to get XP running on a FAT32 filesystem. After installing SP1, it just BSODed repeatedly, although I've since read that disabling the onboard sound in the BIOS fixes this (but I haven't confirmed it).
However, I want an NTFS filesystem as it is more robust, and I want it to be the C: drive (too many programs implicitly assume C:\WINDOWS so I don't want my FAT partition to come first). So basically I ideally want a 6Gb FreeBSD followed by a 12Gb NTFS partition. I can live with the other way arounf as SMARTBOOT can boot from beyond the 8Gb boundary (but many other BIOSes won't)
Here are some of the things I've tried, and the results:
- installing XP with the drive in an old desktop machine (P166); after putting the drive in the IO, I get "No operating system"
- installing XP with the drive in my laptop. After putting the drive in the IO, it gets to the point where it should switch to graphic mode and freezes
- installing XP with the drive in my laptop up to the point where setup first reboots. IIRC, same result as above
- in my laptop, creating a 12Gb FreeBSD partition, then a FAT32 partition. Installing DOS 7 on the FAT32 partition, and copying the contents of the XP CD to it. Putting the drive in the IO, using SMARTBOOT to boot DOS, then running \xpcd\i386\winnt.exe. Result: Setup displays "Copying files needed for setup", copies a bunch of files, then freezes
- connecting a CD-ROM drive jumpered as slave to the IO and trying the installation directly from the IO. Result: setup gets to "Loading NTFS.SYS" and reboots. Presumably this is because I haven't disabled the SANDisk, but I would like to keep the SANDisk running Midori Linux and also don't trust my soldering skills enough to try temporarily disabling it
There are probably a few other variations that I've forgotten about as well.
If anyone else has actually managed this, I'd like to know how. The only thing left that I can think of doing is my penultimate example, but copying the Win98 CD contents to the drive too, and then trying to first install Win98 on the FAT partition and then run setup.exe or winnt32.exe (rather than the 16-bit winnt.exe) to try install XP.
