[ale] If you own (almost) ANY HDD, repartition with 4k boundaries

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi Phil,

Thanks for the note.

I'm not sure a VM counts.  In that case, you're installing XP on a virtual imaginary hdd provided to it by the virtual host system.  Virtualbox, or whatever, probably reports back to the OS being installed that sector numbers and partition boundaries are what they traditionally expect.  It then maps that data into it's own big binary blob that represents the HDD for the client.  I'm not sure that's an acid test, but I'm speculating since I don't know exactly how that works.  I wonder, though, if XP would work if you install to real bare bones hardware, not a VM, and the HDD is partitioned according to the new format.  I think the boot loader is the problem.  Once the OS is kickstarted and it's just reading and writing files, it's probably OK.  Maybe you could use the Vista or Windows 7 boot loader, or even Grub to kickstart the OS and then it would work on bare bones hardware.

Of course, most anyone installing XP at this time could go with 7 and be much better off in almost all aspects.

Sincerely,

Ron


Phil Turmel <philip at turmel.org> wrote:

>Hi Ron,
>
>Great summary!  One comment:
>
>On 01/03/2013 09:00 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
>
>[trim /]
>
>> I should note that you don't want to do this with Windows XP from
>what
>> I've read.  It expects the 1st partition to be at 63, period.
>
>Windows XP will choke if you *move* an existing boot partition.
>However, if you properly partition new drive yourself, it'll *install*
>just fine to a partition starting at the 1MB position.
>
>I have a couple VMs running this way with no issues.
>
>Phil
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