brucewol

Got a little more insight into my issue with XP failing to boot when external CD/DVD unit attached. It will boot when connected but it depends on the USB ports used on the backpanel. There are 3 clusters of USB ports. A main cluster near the ethernet connections, eSata and Firewire. Another cluster for USB 3.0 which I didn't use since I knew there were no USB 3.0 drivers integrated. And a 3rd set that are USB 2.0. When using this 3rd set, XP wouldn't boot except for safe mode. Using the main cluster it will boot in normal mode. I think I must have used the main set to do the initial install which explains how I was able to use my external CD/DVD drive. Probably should avoid USB connectors on the front of the case until all drivers are installed for the same reason. I'm thinking I can also use this main set to load my additional drivers in normal mode. Thought this info might be useful for you.

SUCCESS!!!! Thanks for the quick reply. I found my problem, it wouldn't boot when I had an external USB CD/DVD drive connected. Not sure why as I used this drive to install XP with the NLite integrations. I can add in the rest of the drivers as long as I can use a USB stick or my internal dvd drive. I had disconnected the internal dvd drive during the install because it's a sata style. I don't think it was the lack of my board drivers that prevented it from booting. This didn't cause a problem when I did the install months ago with IDE. When I add the drivers in, I'll use safe mode. Not sure if safe mode will allow me running the programs as they come from evga and nividia. Maybe if the drivers are signed. Will be good to know this though. Again thanks for providing all the information. Nice to be able to breath new life into XP.

Almost I hope I've had an EVGA Z68 SLI motherboard in a system with dual boot W8 in AHCI mode and XP Pro/32 in IDE mode. I did the installations several months ago when W8 first was released and figured I would deal with the AHCHI IDE problem in the future. Now is the future. I used the drivers mentioned in the beginning of this post. I used >32bit Intel RST textmode driver v11.2.0.1006 WHQL< and official Intel INF "drivers" v9.3.0.1026 WHQL. For the textmode drivers, I loaded them all. With AHCI set, I was able to recognize the sata disks and install XP but when it went to start Windows in the final step, it hung. Will continue to hang when I rebooot. I am able to boot in safemode. Took a look in device manager and there are some drivers missing - network, audio, video - I think the same as when I installed XP in IDE mode. Then I just used the drivers supplied with the motherboard after the initial XP ide install. So trying to figure out how to diagnose the problem. On another system, I did an install with IDE set and everything worked, so I believe the install XP cd still has integrity. This is an older system, it originally had XP Media center installed, so it's of XP vintage. Device manager said there were problems with audio and video which I expected. I looked in device manager at IDE ATA and noticed that the driver was Intel 82801FB vs 9.9.1002 with a date 10/5/2012. This means it loaded the drivers that were slipstreamed in via NLite. It doesn't look like the board supports AHCI, so I can't see if I my Nlite build was successful for AHCI. on this machine. Looking at the drivers that evga supplies, they have exe files for chipset and usb 3.0, something that I wouldn't expect the xp cd to have. It looks like if I start the exe to run, it will extract the files for me into user/"my user"/ ... temp based on the log file. If I stop at the extract, I can get to the drivers. If I cancel, then the driver utility deletes them. So I'm going to look at seeing if I can include these via NLite and see what happens. However, in ide mode, this wasn't necessary, so I think I'm grasping at straws. Am I on to something, any other suggestions? Thanks, The guide at the beginning got me further that anything else I've been able to find on the internet. So I'm hoping that I'm close.