[Solved] Windows XP VM doesn't start

[fow0ryl]

Hello,

I'm using Virtualbox on my Linux Boxes for a while, to run a old Windows XP VM.
The VM runs smooth, regardless of using a 4.x Version or the actual 5.0.22 of Virtualbox.
Tested an a old machine with AMD Athlon x64 and NVIDA Chipset and on a newer machine with ASROCK N3700 Board.

Now I have to take the VM to my HP8560p Notebook running Windows 10 (still no Windows fan ...).
So I have copied the vdi file and created an new VM under Windows Virtualbox 5.0.20 but starting the VM failed.
Same problem after upgrading to 5.0.22.

So I tried another way.
Exporting the VM on the Linux machine (ova file) and Import on the HP Notebook running Windows 10.

But starting the VM still failed with blue Screen.

VirtualBox_AcerXP_28_06_2016_08_10_53.png (15.03 KiB) Viewed 1623 times

Why this? How to get it work?

Henning

[michaln]

The short story is that Windows XP is not a very "Plug and Play" operating system. XP was never designed to have an installed copy taken on a hard disk and plugged into a different system. You have a driver in the virtual hard disk (p3.sys) which fails to load on the new host system but is badly written and causes XP to crash (I'm going to guess the driver was written by Intel). You need to get rid of the driver one way or another, or reinstall XP on the new host system.

This may or may not be helpful: viewtopic.php?p=15524

[mpack]

Moved to "Windows Guests", since the host OS is irrelevant to the question asked.

[scottgus1]

So I have copied the vdi file and created an new VM under Windows Virtualbox 5.0.20 but starting the VM failed.

This isn't the correct way to copy a guest to another host. If some settings aren't exactly what they were before, the guest will fail. See this tutorial Moving a VM
The tutorial is also useful re-interpreted as "Backing Up a VM".

[mpack]

That is good advice for the general migration task, but unfortunately it won't fix this particular problem, which is I believe caused by the CPU change.

It's a while since I P2Ved a completely basic version of XP, but I seem to recall that you can simply delete processor.sys (or in this case, p3.sys) from the system32\drivers folder. To do that you would mount the VDI temporarily in another VM.

Don't worry, this doesn't kill the processor. I assume that the driver lets the OS get some processor metrics, but I've never found out exactly what. The guest doesn't seem to be harmed in the least when you delete it.

Caveat: a backup is alwaus a great idea before you start messing like this.

[fow0ryl]

Hello,

since reinstalling XP was no option I tried the solutions like changing the registry, as they are posted in the other linked thread's.
All without success.

Then I just removed the p3.sys files in %systemroot%\drivers and %systemroot%\Servicepacks\i386
Reboot & Wow. Everything seems to work now.

Thank you very much,
Henning

[mpack]

Thanks for confirming the workaround.