XP ISO for virtual machine to enable XP boot on current partition.

[Steve Wright]

Hi all,

I hope you can help with me an what appears to be an odd ball question.

I'm trying to setup a machine with XP running inside a VM - (virtualbox at
present). However, all evidence states at present that I need to reinstall XP
inside the VM software which seems archaic. The other alternative I have
found is the use of an ISO to boot XP on my current XP installation on my
primary drive.

Question - how do I create an ISO on my current XP installation so that the
VM can link in and boot XP from within a VM while still retaining the dual
boot nature of the machine e.g. XP will still need to be fully bootable from
the primary partition if I need it.......? As far as I am aware, I just need
an ISO to kick off the current XP boot procedure.

As far as I can see, this stuff is an elementary requirement?

I hope you can help.

Regards

Steve Wright, UK

 

[Paul]

Hi all,

I hope you can help with me an what appears to be an odd ball question.

I'm trying to setup a machine with XP running inside a VM - (virtualbox at
present). However, all evidence states at present that I need to reinstall XP
inside the VM software which seems archaic. The other alternative I have
found is the use of an ISO to boot XP on my current XP installation on my
primary drive.

Question - how do I create an ISO on my current XP installation so that the
VM can link in and boot XP from within a VM while still retaining the dual
boot nature of the machine e.g. XP will still need to be fully bootable from
the primary partition if I need it.......? As far as I am aware, I just need
an ISO to kick off the current XP boot procedure.

As far as I can see, this stuff is an elementary requirement?

I hope you can help.

Regards

Steve Wright, UK

I've been trying to figure out some of this stuff too, but I really
need to get a processor with VT-x before I can make progress.

This is the first thing a search engine coughed up. The second link
is some kind of P2V tool.

http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/98015/free-virtualization-utilities.html

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?page_id=174

Paul

 

[mikeyhsd]

virtual box just gives the option of running multiple OS's on the same computer.
each OS you chose to run has to be installed separately into virtual box.

another choice is to use software to create an iso/VM of your current XP and load it into virtual box.
however this might violate the xp license as running the same os 2 times on the same computer.

(e-mail address removed)



Hi all,

I hope you can help with me an what appears to be an odd ball question.

I'm trying to setup a machine with XP running inside a VM - (virtualbox at
present). However, all evidence states at present that I need to reinstall XP
inside the VM software which seems archaic. The other alternative I have
found is the use of an ISO to boot XP on my current XP installation on my
primary drive.

Question - how do I create an ISO on my current XP installation so that the
VM can link in and boot XP from within a VM while still retaining the dual
boot nature of the machine e.g. XP will still need to be fully bootable from
the primary partition if I need it.......? As far as I am aware, I just need
an ISO to kick off the current XP boot procedure.

As far as I can see, this stuff is an elementary requirement?

I hope you can help.

Regards

Steve Wright, UK

 

[VanguardLH]

I'm trying to setup a machine with XP running inside a VM - (virtualbox at
present). However, all evidence states at present that I need to
reinstall XP inside the VM software which seems archaic.

So how did you plan on getting an OS inside a virtual machine? Wands only
work in the Harry Potter movies.

The other alternative I have found is the use of an ISO to boot XP on my
current XP installation on my primary drive.

Huh? You're going to *load* an image in an emulated CD/DVD drive when
you're talking about .iso files. You use a program that can emulate optical
drives and which can load .iso image files so it appears to the OS that you
have that drive with that disc inserted into it.

Question - how do I create an ISO on my current XP installation so that
the VM can link in and boot XP from within a VM while still retaining the
dual boot nature of the machine e.g. XP will still need to be fully
bootable from the primary partition if I need it.......?

Think for a moment. What is going to LOAD the .iso file? A program. The
program has to run under an operating system. You're talking about dual
booting which has nothing to do with virtual machines. So what do you
really want to do? Dual-boot your host to run multiple operating systems
but only one at a time? Or use virtual machines so your host OS and
multiple guest OS'es can all run at the same time?

As far as I am aware, I just need an ISO to kick off the current XP boot
procedure.

Haven't worked with VirtualBox for quite awhile (and back then it was just a
trial over a week, or less). Presumably you can designate that CD/DVD
drives on your host OS are accessible in your guest OS (the virtual
machine). So use a CD/DVD emulator on your host OS to load an .iso image.
This looks like a CD/DVD drive with a disc inside it. Then configure the
VMM (virtual machine manager) for the properties of the guest OS to share
that emulated CD/DVD drive from the host OS.

In the past, I've used Daemon-Tools as a CD/DVD emulator to load .iso files.
However, I'm not interested in running games from an emulated optical drive
and DT has a couple bugs I didn't care for (like not reloading the .iso
images on a reboot although it was configured to do so). I went with
Slysoft's Virtual CloneDrive (which they got from Elbysoft). It's free.

http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html

Although a feature missing in CloneDrive is what drive letter gets assigned
to the emulated drive, you can change the assigned drive letter by using
Windows' Disk Manager (diskmgmt.msc) and which sticks across reboots.

 

[C.Joseph Drayton]

Hi all,

I hope you can help with me an what appears to be an odd ball question.

I'm trying to setup a machine with XP running inside a VM - (virtualbox at
present). However, all evidence states at present that I need to reinstall XP
inside the VM software which seems archaic. The other alternative I have
found is the use of an ISO to boot XP on my current XP installation on my
primary drive.

Question - how do I create an ISO on my current XP installation so that the
VM can link in and boot XP from within a VM while still retaining the dual
boot nature of the machine e.g. XP will still need to be fully bootable from
the primary partition if I need it.......? As far as I am aware, I just need
an ISO to kick off the current XP boot procedure.

As far as I can see, this stuff is an elementary requirement?

I hope you can help.

Regards

Steve Wright, UK

Hello Steve,

to begin with, you must realize that a VM is actually that a machine. It
has its own BIOS, and hardware. Granted that they are all virtual
(simulated), it is an actual machine.

You have to install Windows into the VM, because the hardware
specifications of your physical machine and virtual machine are
different. Further, if your version of Windows is an OEM version of
Windows that is tied to the BIOS of the physical machine, it will not
even install. If you create a blank VirtualDisk and copied the physical
hard disk to the virtual hard disk, you would still run into a problem
because the virtual BIOS is different and when you did the repair
install, it would abort.

I ran into this problem a few years ago, and bought a retail (full
install) version of XP Pro so that I didn't have to deal with all of
those annoying issues.

Now then, on the plus side . . . why even bother. I use both
Linux-Ubuntu and Windows. I can by having a VM set-up with WindowsXP use
a real XP environment whether I am on a Linux box or a Windows box.
VirtualBox has versions for both OSes and will use the identical
VirtualDrive. The only change I have to make is the shared folder names
depending on the box I am running on.

The other advantage for someone like myself is that as a programmer, I
like to make sure that the apps I write can run under different versions
of Windows. I have VirtualDisk for Win3, Win386, Win3.11, Win95, Win98,
Win98se, WinNT, Win2000pro, WinXP, WinVista and Win7.

Granted they VM runs slow, they are serviceable for testing the
stability of the code that I write which is my major goal.

It's also nice to have when you have an application that only runs on a
particular version of Windows.

Sincerely,
C.Joseph Drayton, Ph.D. AS&T

CSD Computer Services

Web site: http://csdcs.site90.net/
E-mail: (e-mail address removed)90.net