I've been attempting to get my dual boot of 32 and 64-bit XP working all day and a large part of yesterday. MANY problems have occured:
1. NVRAID won't work in the text mode part of the installer, extracting the files out to floppy and trying to get them in with F6 fails.
2. drives with nvraid turned on but not in any array will be seen by the installer and get unpredictable results, including partition table and MBR corruption.
3. Installing 64-bit windows after 32-bit windows onto a DIFFERENT drive than the 32-bit windows is installed on screws up both the MBR and the ntldr file on the 32-bit install.
4. Windows update complains about needing Administrative privileges in 64-bit windows, even if you log out and log in as administrator.
5. Lots of software fails in 64-bit mode. The one that really surprised me is Firefox sets off NX bit protection alerts in 64-bit mode, but not in 32-bit mode, and yes, my 32-bit install has SP2. Edit: just discovered this is because the Data Execution Prevention in XP SP2 is set by default to protect system processes only, not user applications, while 64-bit by default protects everything. Kind of stupid to have applications off by default if you ask me.
6. Installing 64-bit windows on the same drive as 32-bit windows renames your program files directory to "Program Files x86", but does not update the shortcuts to it. The shortcut to IE for example in 32-bit mode will give you an error about it not being a 32-bit binary after you have installed 64-bit windows because Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe is now the 64-bit version.
7. CD I/O in 64-bit mode is intermittently sluggish, no idea why on this, especially if you try to extract stuff off CD with 2 programs at once. It's like there is no read-ahead cache for the CD so it seeks back and forth. The hard disk access also slows dramatically while this is happening, bringing the whole system to a crawl.
1. NVRAID won't work in the text mode part of the installer, extracting the files out to floppy and trying to get them in with F6 fails.
2. drives with nvraid turned on but not in any array will be seen by the installer and get unpredictable results, including partition table and MBR corruption.
3. Installing 64-bit windows after 32-bit windows onto a DIFFERENT drive than the 32-bit windows is installed on screws up both the MBR and the ntldr file on the 32-bit install.
4. Windows update complains about needing Administrative privileges in 64-bit windows, even if you log out and log in as administrator.
5. Lots of software fails in 64-bit mode. The one that really surprised me is Firefox sets off NX bit protection alerts in 64-bit mode, but not in 32-bit mode, and yes, my 32-bit install has SP2. Edit: just discovered this is because the Data Execution Prevention in XP SP2 is set by default to protect system processes only, not user applications, while 64-bit by default protects everything. Kind of stupid to have applications off by default if you ask me.
6. Installing 64-bit windows on the same drive as 32-bit windows renames your program files directory to "Program Files x86", but does not update the shortcuts to it. The shortcut to IE for example in 32-bit mode will give you an error about it not being a 32-bit binary after you have installed 64-bit windows because Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe is now the 64-bit version.
7. CD I/O in 64-bit mode is intermittently sluggish, no idea why on this, especially if you try to extract stuff off CD with 2 programs at once. It's like there is no read-ahead cache for the CD so it seeks back and forth. The hard disk access also slows dramatically while this is happening, bringing the whole system to a crawl.
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