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(Eventual) Triple OS boot system

G

GunsMadeAmericaFree

Golden Member
I was messing around today trying to install Windows 10 on a HDD I put 3 partitions on about a year ago.

Smallest is about 85 GB & has Windows XP for lots of games for my kids (about 22 GB worth) My kids got some really good grades on their grade cards recently, and I'd like to reward them with some new games. However, I don't really want to install Steam on XP, so I thought I'd try out Windows 10, install Steam, and put some new games for them to try out.

The other two partitions I set up for eventual installs of newer Windows & Linux

I've downloaded about 8 or 9 versions of Linux to play around with, and will eventually stick whichever one I decide I like more on the hard drive.

I ran into a hitch with the Windows 10 install on one of the partititions, though. It's an Intel based system, the first I've built in years. Motherboard is Gigabyte H81M-H, with UEFI Bios.

Message I got was this: "Windows can't be installed on this drive.... to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed to GPT disks."

Did some reading and saw that this situation might be caused by a conflict of UEFI vs legacy settings between DVDR drive and motherboard. I went in there and made sure everything said UEFI, then rebooted. At that point, the partition with XP refused to boot. So, I went in there and made sure that everything said Legacy only - it booted, but the Windows 10 still wouldn't install.

I am thinking that this must be some sort of leftover situation from back when the drive was originally partitioned with the old style master boot record. I have gone ahead and imaged the XP partition onto another hard drive, as well as backed the entire XP data up using another program. I hope that if I start over with the drive I might be able to make sure it is Windows 10 compatible.

For a triple boot system using XP and Win 10 (and eventually Linux), can anyone recommend settings that would allow both XP and Windows 10 to boot ok when using Gparted? Thanks very much in advance.
 
Hmm, so it sounds like there is just no way that I'm going to be able to boot the old XP with UEFI. Yet Windows 10 evidently requires it. It sounds like my options when trying to use a single hard drive are to use either XP or 10 on the system (not both as I had been wanting to)- is that correct?


Would things be simplified at all if I were to install XP on its own hard drive, and then Windows 10 on another? In the old days this seemed to be easier, but I'm still not sure if it would work at all, or if XP would detect the UEFI & refuse to work.......

Will the modern mboard bios allow for an older, small hard drive with XP installed that would need legacy BIOS, or would that also screw up Windows 10 on another drive?
 
Are you trying to say that Windows 10 ONLY installs using UEFI / GPT? Has anyone else found this? That surprises me, that MS would drop legacy booting so quickly. There's an awful lot of machines out there running Windows 7 64-bit, that don't support UEFI. I'm sure that MS would like to offer them an upgrade opportunity (for more $$$, of course).
 
No Win10 doesn't require UEFI. I have Win 10 on a '08 Dell, UEFI didn't come out till ~'12 with Windows 8.
 
GunsMadeAmericaFree said:
I was messing around today trying to install Windows 10 on a HDD I put 3 partitions on about a year ago.

Smallest is about 85 GB & has Windows XP for lots of games for my kids (about 22 GB worth) My kids got some really good grades on their grade cards recently, and I'd like to reward them with some new games. However, I don't really want to install Steam on XP, so I thought I'd try out Windows 10, install Steam, and put some new games for them to try out.

The other two partitions I set up for eventual installs of newer Windows & Linux

I've downloaded about 8 or 9 versions of Linux to play around with, and will eventually stick whichever one I decide I like more on the hard drive.

I ran into a hitch with the Windows 10 install on one of the partititions, though. It's an Intel based system, the first I've built in years. Motherboard is Gigabyte H81M-H, with UEFI Bios.

Message I got was this: "Windows can't be installed on this drive.... to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed to GPT disks."

Did some reading and saw that this situation might be caused by a conflict of UEFI vs legacy settings between DVDR drive and motherboard. I went in there and made sure everything said UEFI, then rebooted. At that point, the partition with XP refused to boot. So, I went in there and made sure that everything said Legacy only - it booted, but the Windows 10 still wouldn't install.

I am thinking that this must be some sort of leftover situation from back when the drive was originally partitioned with the old style master boot record. I have gone ahead and imaged the XP partition onto another hard drive, as well as backed the entire XP data up using another program. I hope that if I start over with the drive I might be able to make sure it is Windows 10 compatible.

For a triple boot system using XP and Win 10 (and eventually Linux), can anyone recommend settings that would allow both XP and Windows 10 to boot ok when using Gparted? Thanks very much in advance.
Click to expand...

Your board supports both legacy and UEFI booting. According to the GA-H81M user manual (pg. 24) the CSM (Compatibility Support Module) should be enabled in order to support a legacy PC boot process and the Boot Mode Selection should be set to UEFI and Legacy in order to allow booting from operating systems that support legacy option ROM or UEFI. I'd also recommend installing NeoSmart's freeware EasyBCD which makes configuration of the boot loader, for your multi-boot selection menu, a simple task. The other consideration is that MBR and GPT can't exist on the same disk. So, if you're determined to run XP, it'll need to be installed on a seperate drive formatted for MBR.

.
 
Last edited:
Thanks! I decided to finally part ways with XP, though I backed everything up and imaged the entire partition onto an external hard drive.

Now I have partitioned the 3 TB hard drive into two halves. Windows 10 is installed on the first partition, and I'll eventually get around to installing some flavor of Linux onto the other.
 
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