Win 10 and FS2004

Propman said:

Hi All,

I have tried numerous installations of FS2004 on my new win 10 machine but have run into numerous problems.

It would seem that Win XP is the best operating system for FS2004, so I formatted an old spare HDD, connected it my Mrs XP PC ,(couldn't do it in Win 10) and installed XP on this HDD. All went well and it runs on Mrs PC.

Installed the HDD on my Win 10 PC. The PC sees the drive but tells me it is empty?

Question is, how do I boot to the HDD with XP on it? The answer is change the BIOS, but I can't see how to do this in my new Win 10 PC. The motherboard is Gigabyte GA-H81M-DS2V. It is set up for Win 8 (I downloaded Win 10 as soon as I got the machine) and always boots to the main HDD. I can't see how to select anything else.
If anybody out there has a clue, I would be grateful to hear from you.

You can't boot to XP if it was installed on a different machine, that's a fact, not an issue, the key is registered to the hardware, not the software, so the OS will only work on the hardware it was activated on, pre-XP you could do that, but not nowadays, you will need to format the drive again and install windows XP on that drive, to do that, in the BIOS, look for boot priority or primary boot device, select the CD ROM drive and boot with the XP disk (it'll say press any key to boot from CD or DVD), now it'll give you options to install windows to the drive you want, format it and install windows, once it restarts the first time, you need to set your boot device to the hard drive that XP is on (again in boot priority within the BIOS) and restart, it'll finish the install and away you go.

I'm not sure, you're using UEFI and I've not used that type of BIOS before, I'm still rocking Phoenix BIOS unfortunately, I'll give a shout to the admin help thread and see who can help out.


In the meantime, @Brink has a tutorial to dual boot 2 Operating systems here Windows 10 - Dual Boot with Windows 7 or Windows 8 - Windows 10 Forums

Yeah, it's my understanding that in order to dual-boot with XP (or Linux), UEFI/secure boot must be turned off. I also heard that Microsoft will be making the "turn UEFI/Secure Boot off, optional" with W10, for OE system manufacturers (whereas previously, it was a mandatory requirement).

I had two rigs dual booting with XP+W8.x. One problem I ran into was that XP would delete all restore points in the W8 partition every time I booted into XP. I had to hide the W8.x partition so XP wouldn't see it and do that. IDK but you might run into the same problem with W10.

Why don't you just run XP in a virtual machine on your W10 system? Wouldn't that be easier than dual boot?

I think this is the user manual for your MB.