sorry for asking a windows questions, but im having issues with my xp installation and im running out of options. ok i have 2 sata drives, /sda has xp on it, although it's not working. here is the problem, i have a asus a8n sli socket 939/ amd64 3000 cpu, and i thinkg thats where the problem is. when im installing xp, i go through the whole process when i reboot, it doesnt load. i know there is a an xp64 edition out there, but im not about to purchase one jus to use it. i just wanted to install xp so i can play games every once in a while. is there a patch or driver that i can download and install to make it work.

Are you getting any boot loader?

im just installed fedora 3 so i can download fedora 5 64 so i can install it. but before installing xp, i had gentoo on my /sda and i know windows doesnt like to be installed on /sdb, so after i decided to wipe out my gentoo and install xp on /sda and use my /sdb drive to install fedora, gentoo and slackware. but like i mention ealier, after all xp installation was completed, i installed my mobo drivers, my video card drivers, etc and rebooted and it wouldnt allow me to log in. the few times that i was able to boot, had to do it in safe mode. im almost sure it has to do my cpu since the version of windows i have its not 64 compatible. if anyone knows of a solution that does not involve buying the 64 edition of xp, please let me know

You don not need to install 64 bit windows. Using the 32 bit version will work fine, although you won't get the benefits of the 64 bit processor, as the 32 bit version won't use anything more than the 32 bit computations.

The posts you have here don't make much sense to me, sorry. Windows should be installed first, to the beginning of the first SATA drive, then linux afterwards. Linux should be allows to install to the MBR of the first drive, over the windows one. That way the linux bootloader will allow you to boot any of your linux distros as well as XP. You certainly don't need the 64 bit version of windows to get it to work.

Peace,
JimBass

maybe i didnt explain myself accurately, here is what i did

install xp on my sda sata drive. my sdb sata drive was empty , no linux distro whatsoever. after completing the installation of xp, i continued to install a few programs, quicken, firefox, updated windows via windows update, etc. i founded it to be very sluggish. whenever i opened a window and dragged it across my screen, it was mega slow and my cpu usage was 100% which made no sense to me. after i rebooted xp i saw the windows welcome screen and then it went black, nothing happened. i rebooted and was greeted with the screen asking me to select either windows safe mode, normal mode, etc, i tried normal and it didnt boot. then i tried safe mode but didnt help me much.after trinng a few times, i decided to install fedora 3 on my /sdb sata drive which is how im being able to post right now. i will try again and see if it makes a different. maybe im missing something

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ive built 2 systems on that MB one with the same vid card as you an other with SLI running the 6800Xtreem cards, but both with PC3200 not PC2700 ram.

sounds more like a set of bad ram more then anything else. you have an odd number that tells me you are running 1x512, and 1x256 stick of ram.

do you have the sticks in the same bay or are they 1 in ea bay for the ram?

that board has 2 bays for up to 4x2G=8G ram total pc3200 speed.

you should have the 512 in the first and the 256 in the second.

if you installed XP, then it got slugish AFTER installing 3rd party software, my guess would also lean more towards bad software currupting the OS.

there is nothing wrong with your vs of XP, as stated above both 32bit and 64bit XP run just fine on the 939 chipset from AMD.

1st thing.

install and update ALL drivers from Asus for that board including the BIOS and chipset.

2nd, install/update to the latest Nvidia drivers from Nvidia NOT from MS updates.

3rd, remove taht 256M stick of ram and test to see if that helps.

4th, if removing the ram helps, then you need to split them as i mentioned above.

good luck.