We’ve got an Win-XP box that we keep around because it is running some old legacy software. IT doesn’t want it left on the network and has asked for it to be removed.
So my thought was to create a VM instance on a Win 10 box, with the XP running in that VM instance. I’d just spin up the VM instance whenever it was needed. I imaged the XP box, and setup Hyper-V on my Win10 box, only to find out that XP won’t run in a MS Hyper-V instance.
Anyone know of any good VM software that will run on a Win10 box, with XP as the O/S in the VM instance.
Free would be preferable - as we don’t really need any fancy bells or whistles. But it does need to have network access.
Oracle’s virtualbox has worked for XP for me. You have to do a bit of tricky port forwarding for networking to work sometimes, and it’s easier to access the local machine via the router than natively, but it does work.
One limitation is, I think you have to disable hyper-V on the host for Vbox to work. Also, under no circumstances admit to young people that XP was considered a breakthrough and awesome in 2003.
In a related thought, just yesterday while cleaning off the shelf in my home office, I discovered a still shrink-wrapped copy of Microsoft Windows for Workgroups (complete with 3.5" floppies) and a still shrink-wrapped copy of Microsoft MS-DOS 6.22 (equally complete with 3.5" floppies).
Both products are marked “For Distribution Only with a New PC”.
My wife said, “Wow… those might be worth something!”
I made an image with the SysInternals Disk2VHD. But VirtalBox didn’t like it. I’m thinking it was because Disk2VHD defaults with “Use VHDX” enabled. I’ve unchecked that and am now making a VHD version. And if that one fails too, I’ll give “P2V” a try.
I use Macrium reflect free version, and somewhere there’s a free utility to mount a VHD as a drive (or maybe it’s right in Windows?). Then you just clone and do a bit of fiddling to make it bootable.
