Dual boot Win 8.1 and Win Xp with Sata IDE and AHCI issues

rstiner

Distinguished
Feb 12, 2010
3
0
18,510
My friend ask me to help get his system running dual boot with 8.1 and XP and we have tried for 2 days. We have the XP drive booting and the 8.1 drive booting but together they will not both boot. We have used easy bcd 2.2 and each time one or the other will not boot without going into the bios and changing the sata from IDE to AHCI. Win 8.1 likes AHCI and Win XP likes IDE? If you could give some direction it would be super. He said he needs this for older XP copy programs and using his TV tuner. He doesn't want to go to Win 10 because of no Media Center and TV tuner support. Any help would be greatly appreciated....
As suggested I posted this here for others to see if it will help.
 

popatim

Titan
Moderator
which motherbd does he have? Sometimes you can set the two highest ports to run ide/legacy and leave the lower numbers ports in ahci.
the other option is to install 8 while the ports are in ide mode. yes 8 will be alot slower like that but it should work. i have an htpc running 8 in ide mode.