the q u a d b o o t

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]In my last video, I attempted to install and run Windows 10 on this old e- machines laptop. I say attempted because just like everything else I do, it didn't end very well. So now I need something else to run on this computer, which is why today I'm rolling with a different idea. If you can believe it, I've never installed more than two operating systems on one computer. The idea of something beyond a dual boot, like a quad boot or something like that, isn't really unique or interesting at all. But regardless, I've always thought about doing it anyway, trying to install several operating systems on one machine, but I just I haven't had anything where it made any sense. But with this computer being out, it seems like the perfect opportunity. This computer has an SSD and one that's large enough and it doesn't really have an operating system on it. The plan is simple. Install several Windows versions on this computer and see what happens.

[00:01:02]Specifically, I'm going to be installing Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

[00:01:08]And I should point out, aside from 2000 being obvious, all of these are the x86 versions, even though the x64 ones would be better suited to the computer. Now, I know what you're probably thinking. What the hell, man? That's incredibly basic and boring. Well, I'm being super conservative with my choices on purpose because I want this to still be somewhat functional. As much as I enjoy old Linux, it doesn't work very well on this computer. And the same can be said for something like Windows 8 or 10. Clearly, on paper, these four should work. I mean, this computer does have a good CPU for its era and a good GPU with WDDDM drivers. So, while I want to stick to XP, something like Windows Vista or Windows 7 should run okay on this thing with an SSD in it. Look, I'm really trying to give this computer an easy win. After the last video where I put it through a bunch of unnecessary suffering with my lack of knowledge, I've said it plenty of times now, so I'll keep it brief. This thing has an AMD Athlon 64 3000 plus mobile CPU and it has an ATI mobility Radeon 9600 GPU and it has an MSA SSD in it. That's basically everything you need to know. Anyway, here's the calamity from last time. Of course, it immediately fired up to this screen. Otherwise, I would normally back up OS stuff from previous videos, but this time around, I want nothing to do with this one. In fact, I have never been more excited in my life to format a computer. I started working on this before I even published the Windows 10 video. I've never really installed Windows 2000 on this computer before, but I mean, it's Windows 2000. It should probably work fine. I didn't entirely know what to do with a 256 GB drive due to the lack of any 48bit LBA support, but since I'm installing four operating systems, I just have to split the drive into quarters or roughly 60 gigs per operating system, which is not bad for a 2004 computer. Despite using a CD, the install process was incredibly fast on this setup. The entire process only took about 5 minutes in total. Of course, this thing was missing all kinds of drivers, but before I could fix that, my camera decided it had enough for the day. So, apologies for the crappy phone footage, but you probably know how it is. Anyway, it was time for some snappy driver installer. This process was super slow for some reason, so I let it be while I enjoyed some of the new Forza Horizon 6.

[00:03:53]There was absolutely no reason for me to include this part at all. And yet, I did anyway. For the most part, driver installation was about as boring as you could expect. But unsurprisingly, I did run into a blue screen issue with what was likely the graphics driver. Some things never change, I guess. At least I was able to get into safe mode. And I can't believe I'm saying that again. I was able to uninstall the driver and it was able to reboot. So, at least it was recoverable. You would have never known cuz I didn't have any microphone plugged in, but I did have working audio now.

[00:04:30]But then I remembered something important. This computer's recovery DVD actually has a copy of the drivers on the root of the disc, which was actually incredibly convenient and probably a better fit for this computer. Anyway, hey, look at that. Functioning graphics.

[00:04:48]I haven't seen this thing in widescreen in so long now. I probably didn't have to, but I did decide to change all the drivers over to the ones on the disc anyway, especially for things like the wireless card. Your computer is equipped with a Synaptics pointing device. Your pointing device has many more features and capabilities than an old-fashioned mouse.

[00:05:10]Wow. Anyway, Windows 2000, no problem at all so far. So, let's keep going. There wasn't that much to say about the Windows XP install process. It was still fairly quick and it booted the second part of setup with no issue at all.

[00:05:25]Interestingly, I did have more issues installing drivers from this disc on Windows XP compared to Windows 2000. So, I'm not really quite sure how that happened. The Touchpad driver installer pretty much crashed the entire computer, so it had to be restarted several times.

[00:05:43]But even with that minor hiccup, again, nothing really crazy so far. Now, where things got interesting is when I tried to install Windows Vista on this setup.

[00:05:54]This is where I noticed the partition situation was a bit strange since one of the two previous operating systems left the unforatted space as extended. Not that I thought it would be an issue, but I just kind of thought it was interesting. But otherwise, despite installing this over USB, it was definitely a lot slower than Windows 2000 and XP. But everything looked good right until it had to reboot for the next part of setup. It turns out it couldn't boot on its own. In fact, it didn't even try to load. It just immediately threw up an error due to wind load. The older versions still work fine, but Vista just didn't want to boot for some reason. This is really unusual for a fresh install. I tried startup repair anyway, but all it did was get stuck in a loop where it knew the bootloadader was missing, but it couldn't seem to fix it. So then I thought I'd try it again in case something had just glitched out. But again, no luck. I didn't think I had done anything wrong, but at this point now, I didn't really know what to do.

[00:07:05]But what I did know is that I also had a virtual machine where I tested this exact thing beforehand and I got it working perfectly and I even got Windows 7 to install as well. So I figured I could just take the SSD, plug it into my actual computer and use it in the virtual machine to troubleshoot this and possibly configure it on here if I had to. But then when I actually attached it to the virtual machine and tried to boot it, the worst possible thing happened, it booted perfectly fine. I promise I hadn't done anything with the drive. I just plugged it into my computer as it was in the laptop. So for it to boot on the VM but not the computer suggests it's a computer issue rather than just a software issue. In fact, unfortunately for me, everything worked perfectly once I continued set up on the virtual machine. And soon I was at the desktop like nothing had happened at all. And even Windows 7 had installed just fine on the VM. So I tried putting it back in the computer, but Windows 7 didn't want to boot and Windows Vista had an interesting issue because it didn't fail with the same error as before. rather it blue screened with a generic 7B error.

[00:08:28]Naturally, I thought this was because of an IDE driver issue, but even after correcting that, the issue still persisted. I also thought maybe there was still a chance, but starter Prepare was once again just completely clueless, and if anything, it just seemed to make everything worse since running it just brought me back to the original error from earlier. So, I guess back to the virtual machine I go. Although there really didn't seem like much I could do.

[00:08:58]In the meantime, I started running updates on these installs, which worked fine, but I really I didn't want to set up the install like this. I wanted to get it working on the computer before I did much else. Since I had gotten this far and technically had a working setup, at least in the virtual machine, I made a backup of the drive and decided to try a few other methods in the hope that something might do the trick. But unfortunately, to make a long story short, nothing made it work. I tried a different Windows disc I've used in the past on this computer, but it had the same issue. And then I thought it could have been due to the weird partition setup. So, I tried to repartition everything after Windows 2000 installed, but this just caused more issues than it solved. As it turns out, I'm afraid this computer just kind of sucks. I actually remembered something about this computer when I attempted to boot the Vista copy on the computer after setting it up on the virtual machine, which is that oftent times it just can't do that. It can't boot Windows installations that were set up on a different computer.

[00:10:09]Something about this computer's BIOS or chipset or some other component just seems to prevent it from being able to work. Instead, all it'll do is put out a generic 7B stop error like what happened earlier. Now, another thing I was doing while working on this video was reducing the OS selection down to just XP and Vista, but even that doesn't work. So, it seems that in addition to having it being installed on this computer specifically, it also at minimum cannot be mixed with an older NTLDR operating system because otherwise it just messes up something with the bootloadader that this laptop just doesn't like. To be clear, I can't really think of any other computer in my collection that behaves this way. Every computer from this era I've ever tried to dual boot Vista on has just worked fine. Unfortunately, it just seems this is just not going to work on this computer the way I wanted it to. I've exhausted basically every option I can think of. And I think between this and the last video, I've just kind of had enough of working with this computer for now.

[00:11:30]But there is one other option, and that's to get out a different computer.

[00:11:37]While I really wanted to use this computer for this project, I don't want to use it that badly. I'm going to leave it here for today, but I did some testing and I think next time around I'll be revisiting this idea on a familiar face to some.