Win XP Pro on Maximus VIII Formula question

[Jones0610]

Just received my lovely formula mobo. Currently running OpenSuSe on it for test purposes. So far so good. Plan to install Win10 Pro once I get the bitlocker issues figured out.

As a standard practice I usually pop on a HDD with Win XP Pro for test purposes and this almost always works (of course the OS needs to be re-verified)....

Tried to boot with a known good XP Pro HDD and got as far as the failed boot screen. None of the choices worked including safe mode, no networking.

This is my first ROG build and my first syklake build. Is there something about this new stuff that would prevent XP Pro from running?

I have several legacy XP machines that I still use in "production" mode. I was planning on upgrading the hardware to ROG to speed them up some but continue to run XP Pro for a while longer.

I realize that XP is well past end of life but if I can migrate these old XP HDDs to new ROG mobos that would be great.

My "system" is currently in a very bare, breadboard stage. G4400 CPU, 16Gb g.skill 3200 RAM, BIOS:2202

Advice, tips, comments will be most appreciated.

[Nate152]

All right, since they aren't replying to your tickets or emails give their live chat a try they're online now.

Click components and fill out the little form then click start chat.

https://www.asus.com/us/support/article/743

[Jones0610]

Thanks for the tip.

I did as you suggested. The short response is that it would have been less painful to just hit myself on the head with a hammer. ASUS "Support" really is the pits 😞

It would be very helpful if there was a provision to buck problems up to level two (or higher) support. The drones who handle these tickets seem to mostly be working from scripts and have no real understanding on how to use the products they are supporting. I like this forum better.... folks here seem to mostly actually *OWN AND USE* the M8 mobos and products.

Asked the chat person if bitlocker is supported on M8F. After going through the "needs a TPM" hampter wheel, the answer was no.

When I get my Win10 Pro USB stick in a couple of weeks I'll try installing it and see how it goes. I'll update that thread accordingly. I found a thread on answers.microsoft.com that indicates that you need to go into the local policy manager and enable non-TPM encryption.... we shall see.

What would be REALLY helpful would be to talk to someone at ASUS who has actually installed Win10 Pro with bitlocker on the M8F. I'm assuming that somewhere along the design/release path, someone in SQA did this.

Ideally, someone on this forum has also done this but apparently I will be the first to try.

Ditto for the XP experiment. Since the chat person blew me off on my bitlocker question I didn't even bother to ask about XP. You don't need to be a mind reader to guess that her response will be "M8F doesn't support XP". Sigh.....

The comments/advice/etc on this topic are appreciated, but rather than downgrade my BIOS to a version that's a year and a half old, it would be very cool to hear from someone who's actually slapped an XP HDD on this mobo and gotten it to work.

If I can get Linux to fire right up with no *NIX drivers, a non-FAT/NTSF filesyslem and a totally different bootloader, getting a known good XP HDD (or the XP Install CD) to at least boot up seems reasonable to expect. Especially since a year an a half old BIOS version (0018) apparently did this.