I recently acquired a 120GB hardrive for free. Needing something to do with it and the fact that I installed Windows Vista on a separate partition but same drive as my documents, I had reason enough to start my Windows installation over.
I would only need 20GB or so for Vista yet I have 120GB available. Because of this I decided to triple boot vista, xp, and linux all on the same machine. A PCI Express machine.
Windows XP And the PCI.sys 0x0000007E Error
I used GParted to segment up my hardrive and that worked beautifully. The first problem I ran into was that I could not install Windows XP on my PCI Express computer. It simply won't work. So I naturally switched the drive out into my non-express computer.
Next I tried installing Vista on that computer only to find out, that Vista refused to install on it because it failed to meet the system requirements. Darn. So I had a problem on my hands.
After scouring forums I found that I need to slipstream Service Pack 2 (SP2) on to my Windows XP installation. I did this unsuccessfully until I found a great program called Auto Streamer. This was the only method I found where It successfully slipstreamed it. The program combines a downloaded version of SP2 with your Windows XP installation CD and outputs it as a bootable ISO file. You can then use IMGBurn to burn a bootable ISO file.
After that I successfully installed Vista on a 50GB partition and installed Kunbuntu on a 12GB partition. Once that happens the computer boots using the GRUB boot loader and then you can choose Vista and then select either XP or Vista.
To Triple Boot XP, Vista and Kubuntu On A PCI Express Machine
- Slipstream XP with SP2 using autostreamer
- Burn bootable XP/SP2 disk
- Install XP/SP2
- Install Vista
- Install Kubuntu
