Andalu

Glad to see you solved. I want to specify that I have no motive and no interest in promoting a commercial software. I thought it appropriate to recommend ATI because with it I was able to get a fully working XP on a Comet Lake system as it was fully working on the Haswell machine where I had installed it in 2017 and of which I restored an image.

@simon73 you could try Acronis True Image with its "Universal Restore" feature. It also works from a bootable flash drive. You just need to add the sata/ahci driver and click on "Show details" and "Ignore all" for the user interactions required during the process.

Both files copied to a working XP Integral Edition disk (after renaming halmacpi.dll to hal.dll): the system reboots continuously before getting to the XP scrollbar screen. Tried with and without PAE, same behavior. XP boot is completed only in safe mode or by copying only ntoskrn8.sys.

Tried it on a real machine with the same result: the system hangs on the "Setup is Starting Windows" screen.