virtualbox.org

Before I possibly waste a day doing something that MIGHT not be possible, I thought I'd ask here first.

I have need to run a specific industrial protocol analyzer the ONLY runs on XP or older (Siemens Amprolyzer v3.2 for profibus networks). It needs to communicate through a Siemens CP5512 Profibus card that ONLY has drivers for XP or older. This is a "Cardbus" card (basically, PCMCIA but 32-bit) *not* the newer "ExpressCard".

Laptop at hand is a Panasonic Toughbook CF-52, i5 4th gen, with a cardbus slot. OS is Windows 10 LTSC 2019 64-bit. It is not possible to get W10 drivers for the CP5512.

QUESTION: If I build an XP Virtual machine on this W10 host, should the XP VM be able to use this cardbus card even if the W10 host can't?

Fred Mau wrote:Before I possibly waste a day doing something that MIGHT not be possible, I thought I'd ask here first.

This is an absolutely awesome choice, and beats the living daylights out of those few posters who get on the forum after spending days on an idea then come here ranting about how 'poorly designed' (or worse) they think Virtualbox is. Big thumbs up!

Regrettably, though,

Fred Mau wrote:a "Cardbus" card (basically, PCMCIA but 32-bit)

Virtualbox does not have a way to pass a host Cardbus device into the VM. USB, serial, and parallel ports can be passed, but not other types.

This one will at least have to be done with another hypervisor, if not on bare metal.

On the other hand, the CF-52 appears to still have XP drivers available, according to a quick bit of Google-fu. https://pc-dl.panasonic.co.jp/dl/search ... 001&p1=185

scottgus1 wrote: On the other hand, the CF-52 appears to still have XP drivers available, according to a quick bit of Google-fu. https://pc-dl.panasonic.co.jp/dl/search ... 001&p1=185

Thanks, Scott. This saved me AT LEAST a whole day of building an XP VM, getting all the updates, then finding it doesn't work.

Yes, my original plan was to use XP directly on the CF-52, but this model of CF-52 had XP drivers for everything but the Intel 7260 WiFi Card which was a showstopper. But I managed to swap WiFi cards with an older CF-19 which had an Intel 6235 WiFi card (Installing "foreign" WiFi cards on these things can be dicey, but in this case it worked).

I still would have liked to use a VM rather that having to swap hard drives to run XP, but if it's not possible because of the Cardbus card then it's not possible,

Thanks again.