Windows 8 & XP

People have been dual booting Windows and Linux since the mid 90's. Its a very common thing and it works fine. Heck its been pretty simple to dual boot different versions of Windows since the days of Windows 98.

What antille said is true. If you partition your hard drive into 2 parts, Windows won't have any idea that Linux is there, cause it's fairly oblivious to any non-MS partition formats, so it will just assume that it has a smaller amount of hard drive space available. Meanwhile, Linux takes up the other partition and operates independently of Windows. It is smart enough to see Windows partitions, and even allow you to read/write to them without any issues, unless you go and fiddle with the Program Files or Windows directories.

The only part that would affect both is that the master boot record of the hard drive would change, wiping Microsoft's bootloader and replacing it with a Linux bootloader that will allow you to select Windows or Linux to boot, rather than booting straight to Windows. This only becomes an issue if you decide to remove Linux, after which Windows won't boot properly because there won't be a working bootloader in the MBR. This can be solved by popping in the Windows disc and doing a quick repair.

Actually, one method I use to get around this issue is to have Windows and Linux installed on separate hard drives. Windows is installed on the first, and once complete, the BIOS are changed to make the second hard drive to be the boot hard drive, and install Linux here. This means that the MBR of the Linux hard drive is always used to boot, allowing for a selection between Windows and Linux. However, if you want to revert back to Windows only, changing the BIOS to point back to the Windows hard drive as the boot hard drive means it will use that MBR instead, which still has the Windows bootloader on it.

Hopefully that's pretty clear, as it's hard to explain in text only. Perhaps I should draw a picture.

In any case, you will have no issue getting Linux and Windows to work side by side on modern computers.

I'm struggling to envisage how you have this ramdisk set up to access >4GB with a 32-bit OS also running. Is it a pseudo hardware thing with more RAM added to it (i.e. PCI card or SATA dongle)? Is it 64-bit software running XP inside an effective virtual container (the ramdisk software being a hypervisor of sorts)?

Anyway, to try and answer your question: when you install Linux (especially one of the Ubuntu based distributions) it will ask if you want to dual boot, and add its own boot manager (usually GRUB). GRUB will set up a boot option that points to the Windows bootloader; Windows will not even know it is a dual boot system, it'll just carry on as normal when you select that option.

If your ramdisk is fully software, and tied to the Windows boot, then it won't be active when you boot to Linux (GRUB will be set up as the first bootloader to run), so the 64-bit Linux OS will be using all your RAM natively, and Windows should still use your ramdisk workaround when you boot into Windows.

However without knowing exactly what your ramdisk is, and how it is set up, it's difficult to make any guarantees. Download and try the Mint / Ubuntu / other distro "Live CD" and boot from that, it should show up any boot time issues without having to make any changes at all to your hard disk.

Note: some gaming keyboards with "anti-ghosting" features don't work properly in Linux without turning the anti-ghosting off. It's usually a key combination to change (e.g. ctrl-shift-alt-N and ctrl-shift-alt-G), but be aware of this if you try a Live CD and the keyboard fails to respond

I thought ramdisk was like a normal storage drive for the OS, but made of ram instead, so it's an NTFS issue, not a ram issue

NTFS can manage files up to 16 terabytes in size so creating an 8+ gig paging file and loading it onto a RAM Disk is certainly doable. However if your ever actually do run out of ram Windows will suddenly no longer be able to allocate additional swap space. This is very bad™.

Normally the purpose of the paging or swap file is to give the OS somewhere to put things when the RAM is full. Since hard drives are generally very large this lets the system keep going (although slowly) under almost any circumstances. By moving the swap file into ram you remove the safety net that it normally provides.

So while it is an interesting workaround its not really a good idea and it isn't a long term solution.

First you need to check which CPU you have, you may find that information in "Control Panel" -> "System Properties". After find information on Intel or AMD website. Starting from 2008 most of processors is 64 bit, only few Intel Atom models lack of 64 bit support, but I dunno if any current-gen game might work on it. :roll:

So there is 99% change chance that your hardware compatible with 64-bit Windows 7/8 or x86_64 Linux.

There is no any problem with dual-boot with Windows XP and Linux. But I recommend you only do that if you understand what's you doing. At least you need to backup all important information to other computer/usb storage.