virtualbox.org

Hi, everyone -- first post. The motherboard on our development system fried and I am trying to get a VM running with the HDD which fortunately survived. So far, I have been successful in creating a .vhd drive using Disk2vhd, creating a VM with VirtualBox and having it "see" the .vhd, which represents one physical drive with two volumes, what were a C and D drive. The "C" drive partition contains the installed XP Pro system. The Host machine is a new, loaded Windows 8.1 box.

The VM opens empty, as is, according to the manual, normal. The next step normally calls for the installation of the OS to be used in the VM. Problem is, the XP system came pre-installed and I have no physical CDs. It is, however, part of that virtual drive.

How do I proceed?

If you have created a virtual disk using disk2vhd, you create a new virtual machine using that .vhd as its virtual disc. There is an option to use an existing virtual disc when you create a vm.

Even so, there is no guarantee that the OS will boot, and even less chance that it will activate. The device drivers which were loaded in the OS for your original install will probably not work for the virtual devices of the vm. This can usually be fixed by doing a repair install of the OS, but this will be tricky without the installation files. They may be among the files copied from the original system. It depends on how the OEM configured it. Sometimes they provide them, sometimes you only get an image file.

What you're trying is called P2V, for Physical-to-Virtual. You could try doing a web search:

"P2V XP site:forums.virtualbox.org"

which will bring up the forum pages discussing others' attempts to get an old XP OS into Virtualbox.

Another thought would be to start off with a fresh XP install in Virtualbox and install your development environment fresh in the XP guest. Use Mpack's CloneVDI (viewtopic.php?f=6&t=22422) to make a clone of the vhd file and turn it into Virtualbox's native vdi format (vhd is inherently delicate and easily damaged due to a design flaw - vdi is much more robust). Then attach the vdi copy of the old XP drive as a second drive in the XP guest, and transfer the development data from the vdi to the new XP guest's drive.