How can I install Win XP on brand new mainboard (ASUS P8Z68-V Pro)?

[tluxon]

I took advantage of some Black Friday deals to build a long overdue new PC. It's basically made up of an ASUS P8Z68-V Pro motherboard and the i5-2500K CPU, 8GB of DDR3 memory, 1.5TB Seagate 6Gbps HDD, and optical BD burner.

I've installed Windows XP on several PCs that already had Windows 7 installed without issue, but this is an animal of a different stripe.

I installed Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit with no problems, but I'm finding no successful way to install Win XP Pro due to the lack of being able to load the required AHCI driver. The Win XP installation OS seems only to be willing to load this driver from a floppy drive, but this new PC has no floppy drive, and all the floppy drives I have require an IDE bus which this motherboard does not have. I tried loading the driver via a USB flash drive to no avail.

I would love to forego installing Windows XP altogether, but I still need it to support some things that either lack a 64-bit driver or aren't supported on newer OS's.

I embedded the required driver into the .iso of one of my Win XP Pro SP2 installation CD's and burned it to a new DVD disk, but no dice - I still got the BSOD 0x0000007B error.

Anybody have any ideas for how to move ahead with a Windows XP installation?

 

[mag05003]

Have you tried running your older programs in compatibility mode? Also - no clue how to fix your problem. I have seen IDE>SATA adapters before. You could also try a floppy emulator but I'm just makin stuff up now.

 

[tluxon]

Have you tried running your older programs in compatibility mode? Also - no clue how to fix your problem. I have seen IDE>SATA adapters before. You could also try a floppy emulator but I'm just makin stuff up now.

Thanks for your reply.

One of the programs is a firewire capture utility (copies transport stream of copy-freely flagged programming from our cableco's DVR firewire output) that has no 64-bit driver and most likely never will according the driver creator. Windows 7 32-bit should run this just fine, but I'd need to buy another copy of Windows to do that.

The other thing is a Keyspan PS-4A 4-port USB Printer Server. It works great with Windows XP, but has no driver support beyond Windows XP 32-bit.

The Windows XP installation process asks first thing if there is a RAID driver that's needed for the storage drive. If F6 is pressed, the installation process continues loading files into memory until it gets to the point of needing access the storage drive. At this point it reports that no driver is found on the Floppy Drive and to press ENTER to continue anyway and F3 to exit the installation. At no point does it indicate or suggest that there is any other way to make the driver available than on a floppy drive.

I'm making a wild guess here, but I'm wondering if getting the BIOS to report any attached media as an "A:" drive or a floppy drive might "trick" the installation process into considering it an accepted source of the needed driver.

 

[tluxon]

The problem is now solved.

In short, the Windows XP setup disks don't have the proper drivers for SATA devices on newer chipset motherboards. The trick is in how to provide them without a IDE floppy provision on the motherboard. ASUS technical support said I can do it with a USB Floppy and some tweaks to the driver, but others tipped me off to what a lot of people are having the best results from - slipstreaming the proper driver with the nifty little program nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/).

In the case of the P8Z68-V PRO, this process doesn't work without first integrating SP3 into the setup disk (basically copying the contents of the CD to a temporary folder and extracting Microsoft's SP3 executable with the /integrate option). That can be done manually or via nLite.

For the SP3 integration, I pretty much followed the steps laid out at http://www.howtohaven.com/system/slipstream-xp-service-pack-3.shtml.

For inserting the proper driver, I followed the process detailed at http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/107504-integration-of-intels-sata-ahci-and-raid-drivers/.

Maybe this can help someone else with a similar issue.