Running Windows 8 on ASUS M3A?

[Rhino]

I am giving serious thought to finally upgrading from Windows XP SP3 to
Windows 8. I have the ASUS M3A motherboard.

First, does anyone know if I can upgrade straight from XP to 8? Or would I
need to upgrade to Vista or Windows 7 first, then to Windows 8?

Second, I have two 750 GB hard drives as well as a third 3 TB hard drive,
all internal. When I installed the 3 TB drive last year, I had to run
special software, Seagate Disk Wizard, in order to make the full 3 TB
visible to XP. If I upgrade to Win8, will the install magically enable Win8
to see all the data on the 3 TB drive without taking any special
precautions? Or will I need to do something first, like backing up all the
data, reformatting the 3 TB drive, doing the install of Win8, then loading
all the data back on the 3 TB drive?

Are there any other gotchas that I should expect while upgrading to Win8?

It's not that I particularly want or need Win8 but it feels like it's
finally time to retire XP in favour of something from this decade. With
support on XP dropping any day now - or is it already gone? - and Win8 being
a lot more affordable than Win7, this feels like the right move to make. I'm
just trying to anticipate any problems that might come along during the
upgrade.

--
Rhino

[Paul]

You can try this thing. It's supposed to indicate
what might not make a Windows 8 upgrade very happy.

http://web.esd.microsoft.com/W8DL/WSEC5B1D8A9DFDFD92DFB736C5B1D8956B5B1D8/Windows8-UpgradeAssistant.exe

The Assistant also contains the upgrade tables. An
upgrade from WinXP to Win8 is a "Clean Install", as
applications won't be ported. This is partially to
do with differences in folder structure. If you had
Windows 7 on the disk, then it will do an actual
"Upgrade Install", keeping the applications.

You'll probably also have to do something about your AV,
like disable it or uninstall it before doing the move.

There are a couple tools for bringing back classic menus,
and making Metro a little less conspicuous. This is not
one of them. The only reason I'm mentioning this one, is
I have it bookmarked. I didn't bookmark the other references
when they came up.

http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/features.html

For your amusement, the topic of a free "Dummy" book came up
yesterday. This is about 10MB or so. This might help if
you choose not to "cheat" in terms of using the interface.

https://marketing.dell.com/Global/FileLib/Windows_8/windows-8-ebook.pdf

A reason Windows 8 won't install on some older hardware, is
a lack of hardware support for NX or XD bit. But AMD did NX
first, meaning their hardware is more likely to work with
Windows 8. My P4 processor on the other hand, is out of luck
when it comes to Windows 8. Only my two Core2 systems are
candidates for Windows 8. The NX/XD dependency didn't come up
until the last preview version was released. The only surprising
part, is they didn't seem to mention this was going to happen.
The technical requirements might still state somewhere "1GHz processor",
implying ancient hardware would work. But it didn't work out
that way in the end. I hope the Assistant.exe above can catch
that, before you've given your credit card details.

Paul

[jackso...@gmail.com]

I know this post was awhile back, but I wanted to say that if you haven't upgraded yet - and you have any ATA drives - don't upgrade. BTW - the upgrade website and the upgrade tool mentioned below will tell you that the M3A is completely compatible with Windows 8 when it is obviously not.

I've got two ATA DVD drives in my tower running off the M3a main board and while EVERY other device on the board survived the upgrade from win7 to win8 - it appears that the old drivers for the ATA IDE controller is not compatible with Windows 8, so none of my ATA drives are currently detected by windows. I spent about a hour online with Microsoft support and their best solution was to wait for a new driver. Getting in touch with the manufacturer has also been a challenge because to even get past their "contact us" page you have to have your serial number, date of purchase, place of purchase etc. . . and since I don't know where my original paperwork is now (I moved recently) and I've yet to feel like pulling apart my computer to see if the serial number is on the board itself, I don't have any idea what my serial number is - which means I cannot contact Asus and ask when they plan on supporting windows 8.