XP Pro 64 bit on second drive-will it work?

This post is in the off-topic discussion, due to Linux Mint 9 (just released) being involved. I want to place XP Pro 64 bit on my second drive, since I'll need to remove my main drive to do the Mint install. This will eliminate the need for needing to use XP Mode when needing XP. A conventional install is always better than a VM is, for obvious reasons. My concern here is, will Windows Update find the necessary drivers for my system to run XP? I'd like to do it, and know how to, but don't want to waste my time if it won't work. Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Cat

Catilley you can have up to 4 primary partitions. The partition has to be a primary partition before you can mark it as active. When you mark a partition as active, your computer will boot from or at least try to boot from this partition. This gives you four partitions that you can boot to simply by changing which partition is active.

Mark partition one as active then reboot and install the first OS.
Mark partition two as active then reboot and install the second OS.
Mark partition three as active then reboot and install the third OS.
Mark partition four as active then reboot and install the forth OS.

However if you want a data partition you would need one of the four partitions for the your data. You can however use one of the four as an extended partition and place several logical partition within the extended partition. It is also possible to place an OS on logical partitions, however you can only boot to a primary partition. From the active partition you would need some kind of boot manager to point to the logical partition(changing the active partition alone will not work in this instance).

Clifford, is that per disc, or drive? Most of the time, the second drive isn't even plugged in, unless I'm using Mint. Then, I manually choose to boot into that drive.

That would be only one hard drive. Each hard drive would have those choices. Another problem you may encounter is the boot managers may or may not support booting to more than one hard disk. The freeware Boot Managers often only allows you to multi-boot partitions on the same drive.

In your case booting to a USB drive, following Nibiru advice and selecting the Hard Drive to boot to from within the System BIOS is not a bad option. This way you are not dealing with a full time boot manager while the USB drive is disconnected.

Remember Cat, If win7 is one of your op systems and it creates the 100MB partition, that counts as 1 of the 4 primary's.

That's what I've been doing since adding that drive. Upon startup, you press & hold the Esc key to go into the Boot Menu. That's what Nibiru & yodap explained to me when installing the OS on that second drive. If I had left my main drive in during the install, the GRUB bootloader would control the whole system. In fact, that's what happened when I first tried this drive out on my laptop, the Linux bootloader ran both drives. I didn't want that to happen on my desktop, so I followed their advice and removed the main drive. Then I installed Linux, and use the boot menu to select which drive I want.
I want to use the drive when I want, but don't want it to control my whole system. So that part is already covered.

Did you actually run XP 64 when you had XP? The value I find with virtual XP is that it runs old 32 and 16bit apps, your XP 64 won't run 16 bit.

No, I didn't ever run XP Pro 64 bit, in fact, I never was even aware of 64 bit XP or 2003 server until recently. However it doesn't matter, the attempt at installing it failed. Mint 9 installed perfectly, though. I had this problem with Win 2K when installing it on a large drive, and the same problem showed with XP. But at one time, on my first desktop (a Dell Optiplex GX 280, or something to that nature), I had XP Pro & Home on a 500GB hard drive. Now I know that Win 2K won't install on a drive over 127 or 137GB, but XP did. What I think it is, is the type of drive it is that you install it on. I've never seen XP on a Sata drive, but there's the older one, I believe it's an IDE drive. I'm going to have to do some checking on this, to see if there's a way to get and install one of those in a case, and try that. You also have another correct point, TrainableMan, I don't believe that 64 bit XP will benefit me. But the 32 bit would, and as usual with me, once I set my mind on something, I don't give up easily. If there's a way, you can believe that I'll find it. The regulars here can vouch for that.

You might try formatting a partion as FAT32 and try to install it there.

The install disc wouldn't allow me to go that far. Once the initial files loaded, I got that same blue screen with a message that one or more of my discs may have problems, to run chkdsk. There were some codes, too. This very same screen appeared when I attempted to install Win 2K on a large drive. Will XP run on FAT32? I'm not questioning your advice here, mabye you've done something that I haven't. I was taught to install XP on NTFS, even though you have the option to format as FAT32. I'm going to have to find another way to partition than GParted to do this. And one other thing, I have a perfect install of Mint 9 x64 on this drive that was just completed today. I spent over three hours doing the install, updating, and installing software. That partition would have to be shrunk from the left side, as Windows does not take a second position to Linux. I have a question of you. I have a 160GB WD passport external drive, it's small. Can such a drive be made bootable? I know that's not a SATA drive, in fact, at one time, it had "sync" software on it. You could sync your computer into it, and use your computer on someone else's. But I don't want to sync. I want to know if an OS can be loaded on it and boot. If so, that would give me two extra drives to plug into my computer, and I could select from each from the boot menu in the BIOS.