Installation and dual boot with a preinstalled Windows XP

[dyngoman]

Good day,

I have 2 brand new Asus K52JT laptops with the following specs:
- i3 380M
- 4Gb DDR3
- HDD SATA II 750Gb
- ATI Radeon 6370M 1Gb

They both came with Free Dos installed.
On one of them I have successfully installed Windows XP , tweaking the bios to use the ATA instead of the AHCI controller. Generally the drivers work fine except for the card reader witch doesnt want to install. Being pleased with the results I have decided to leave the first laptop like this and experiment a little with the other one.
What I want to do is use nLite software to inject the SATA drivers into an Windows XP installation iso to enable the AHCI controller and install.
Then, if everything works fine I would like to install Windows 7 x64 on another secondary partition as the second OS.

The problem is that I am not sure witch SATA drivers i need and from where to procure them.

My question would be if anyone has tried something like this before and if there are any general rules or knowledge that i should be aware of.
Also, does a Windows 7 x64 installation messes up my XP installation ?

 

[americanbrian]

I can only answer your last question, It is easy enough to dual boot XP and Win7, I have done it myself.

However, make sure you install XP first as I have heard that Win7 will block installation of an older OS (it is likely to have a workaround, but for ease just do XP first).

 

[pjmelect]

If you are making a dual boot Windows 7, Windows XP system then the older (Windows XP) operating system must be installed first. Installing Windows 7 will replace the Windows XP boot loader and will give you a menu choice as to which operating system you wish to install. One problem with dual booting like this is that Windows XP will delete all of Windows 7 restore points unless you make the Windows 7 partition invisible to Windows XP via a registry tweak.
For the SATA drivers you will need to visit your motherboard makers web site and download them (if available).