Installing Windows XP under UEFI mode only

Hey all I have been at this for several months now. I currently own a Intel Computestick model which has an atom processor and 2GB of ram. I understand that when Windows XP was out there was no such thing as a UEFI boot. I have added the needed SATA drivers in order for it to find the SSD inside it. Problem being is that it just wont boot into the windows xp setup at all naturally because its UEFI only. The computestick I am using for this wonderful experiment is the STCK1A32WFC. But there has to be some type of way of doing this! A lot of my very very old programs will only work in XP and I purchased these computesticks for that single purpose - installing windows XP on.

The computestick does not have a legacy BIOS option sadly, So simply changing to Legacy BIOS in the BIOS is not an option. I have tried it out (the ISO) in virtualbox and it works just fine - in legacy mode naturally.

The bios screen looks like this:


It has an option of either Windows 8.1/10 32-bit mode or Ubuntu 64-bit mode. Most of the time if I make a Windows XP boot USB via Rufus it boots fine in Windows 8.1/10 mode using GPT and UEFI selected. When I try running, say Ventoy, it will only boot up the windows xp iso using the Ubuntu 64-bit option (since ventoy is linux based menu). Trying to boot from the USB drive using Rufus doing MBR with BIOS (or UEFI-CSM) something like Windows-XP-Professional-Incl-SATA-Drivers.iso does not bring anything up for either option.

I hear its possible to get windows XP to boot in UEFI using some vista beta files which is explained in more detail here But I am unable to follow it.

I understand Windows XP can not boot from a GTP partition and UEFI. BUT there has to be something that can do it out there! :)
It would be awesome if a guru could help out with getting this Windows XP onto this stick!!!

Here is one thing that may help, but you will have to slipstream the driver, add it to your Windows XP setup disc or load it during text mode setup.

Paragon Software GPT Loader for XP
https://www.paragon-software.com/technologies/gpt-loader/#

I did some testing with the GPT loader on XP for use with Windows PE.  It works fine for SATA or IDE drives but not for USB drives.

The other issue you may have to deal with is that XP and Windows 7 use BIOS INT 10 calls to detect and set VGA modes during part of the startup.  If your UEFI firmware does not have the Compatibility Support Module (CSM) to support BIOS calls, then you may have to do additional work.  The problem is that without INT 10, the OS sits at the moving bars splash screen forever.  To get around that problem you have to disable the VGA driver / service and also include a usable graphics driver for your actual graphics device.  People have done that with Windows 7, but I haven't looked to see if anyone did that for Windows XP.

There are other basic booting issues with XP.  Most EFI systems are 64-bit and 64-bit support for XP is fairly recent.  You may have issues getting 64-bit drivers.  Windows XP uses NTLDR, NTDETECT and BOOT.INI to load the OS.  You may have to actually use a Windows 7 or Windows 10 bootlader and maybe even WINLOADER.EFI from a newer OS.  NTDETECT requires a BIOS and NTLDR probably assumes a BIOS as well.  You may be able to get around these problems by putting some of your Windows XP boot and loader files on an MBR disk.  A hybrid MBR/GPT might work, but that has confused Windows whenever I've tried it.

If you really want to run XP under EFI, you might be better off to use a bare metal hypervisor and virtual machine that boots in EFI 64-bit mode and then runs a 32-bit Windows XP VM.  I still do Windows XP software development on occasion and some of my embedded cross-compilers only run on XP.  I just use a Virtual Machine because newer computers lack drivers for XP even if they still have a BIOS or CSM.  You've got Microsoft, VMWare and Virtualbox as choices for running Virtual Machines, but I doubt VirtualBox supports bare metal.

i also don't know if NTVDM (for 16-bit apps) will work on 64-bit XP.  NTVDM does not work on Windows 7 64-bit so that cannot run 16-bit apps that are used to install some older software.  I got around the setup problem by setting up applications on a 32-bit OS and then copying the files.  I also had to use regsvr32 to register OCX and COM dll files for the copied applications.

VirtualBox on Linux runs 32-bit XP just fine in a virtual machine if you don't want to mess with another version of Windows.

I hope some of that helps you.