windows xp running on a vm

abstract

Of the many operating systems I've used, Windows XP was a serious workhorse. It bridged the world of DOS/9x and NT/2k providing a wide range of legacy hardware and application support. This flexibility and utility made it a widely used, supported, and long-lived OS. Most of my web development work and gaming took place in the XP era due to that long life.

Some of that work, like Flash animation, is fully obsolete with no modern software support. But Flash really isn't useful anymore, so it's not a real loss. However, there are plenty of files/software while 'obsolete' from a support standpoint can still be functionally important. But how to recover it? Most software of the time will not install on modern systems. I recently encountered a number of old Adobe Pagemaker files I wanted to work with. But the only way to access the files is in Pagemaker - it uses a proprietary file format abandoned with Adobe's move to InDesign. And Pagemaker absolutely will not install in newer versions of Windows.

The obvious solution might be to install XP on an old computer and run the software on that rig. Unfortunately, hardware has advanced to the point that a 12 year old laptop pulled out of storage was too new for a vanilla XP install - it doesn't support SATA drives out of the box, for example. There are several 'integral' editions of XP available on archive.org that roll in service packs, patches, and 3rd party drivers to get around these limitations. And I has some luck with that. But then I was stuck with an old, slow computer.

The less obvious solution? Set up a virtual machine on my current computer and install XP on the VM. Modern computers have multiple CPU cores, Gigabytes of RAM and hundreds or thousands of Gigabytes of storage. A fraction of those compute resources can be reserved for the XP VM.

resources

software - required

Host machine: VirtualBox

Client/VM: Windows XP Integral Edition - includes Windows XP Pro with service packs, updates, drivers, and utilities rolled into one package.

DAEMON Tools Lite - mount a virtual drive on your host machine, then load a disc image (iso, mdf, mds, bin, img, etc...). The drive can them be attached to your VM and let's you run installs from the virtual drive without having to write the image to a physical disc or USB drive.

software - optional

This is what I needed to install on my client/VM to recover old files.

  • Adobe PageMaker 7.0 - opening .pmd files - a proprietary Adobe file format that is now abandoned. Pagemaker is located on Disc 1 of this set
  • Adobe Acrobat 5.0 - includes Distiller 5 which is needed to exporting files out of Pagemaker, also includes Adobe PDF printer
  • Adobe InDesgin 2.0 - opening old .indd files. 2.0 is period appropriate for an XP install. Located on Disc 1 of this set.
  • Microsoft Office XP - I used my original burned copy, but this should work. Office XP is old enough to work with legacy content from older Office installs like 97, but with compatibility packs installed will open docs from Office 2007 and onward. Good balance between performance and compatibility.
  • Office Compatibility Pack - Required if you need to open newer Office document formats.
  • Serialz - text file with serial numbers scraped from warez sites of the period
  • Serial Shack - Serial #'s for Pagemaker 7.0 and InDesign 2.0
  • LegacyUpdate - A project that has resurrected Windows Update for old versions of Windows. Will install service packs and patches for XP and Office, and patches IE to allow product activation.

references and procedures

manual

VirtualBox manual

tutorials

I found two short tutorials by Professor Eric Prebys covering Virtual Box setup and O/S installs. They are a few years old, but the links are still current and Virtual Box hasn't really changed. Plus there are no ads and garbage since it's from a blog on a .edu site.

Setting Up VirtualBox and installing Windows 10

Installing Windows XP in VirtualBox (or other VM)

videos

How to install Guest Additions in VirtualBox - Professor Robert McMillen shows you how to install Guest Additions in VirtualBox. A short YouTube video on installing the Guest Additions features of Virtual Box for increased stability and functionality.

notes

The linked tutorials are focused on installing Windows 10. I followed much of the process with my XP setup, but I sized my resources to suit the O/S. A single CPU is fine, 256 MB of RAM is 4 times the recommend minimum, and 10GB of drive space is plenty of room for the O/S, a handful of programs, and some files. Use the Shared Files feature of Virtual Box to link your VM to a folder on your host machine for storage as noted in the "Setting Up VirtualBox and installing Windows 10" tutorial.

There are many tutorials and videos available online for VirtualBox installation and configuration. It is not a challenging setup process.

Your hardware must support virtualization and you must enable virtualization in your host machines BIOS settings. This is not optional.

My host computer is an HP business class laptop with an Intel 7th Gen CORE i5i5-7200U CPU running at 2.5GHz.

conclusion

This is by far the most productive and reliable approach I have found for installing legacy operating systems and programs for file/data recovery. Installing legacy software on modern systems generally ranges from impossible to buggy at best. And leveraging legacy hardware to install legacy operating systems and software is time and labor intensive.

I have not explored games on the XP VM, but productivity tools load and run extremely well. I suspect simple games will run well. If I do test this I'll update this report with my results.

Created: 2024/03/06

windows xp running on a vm

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