Is it possible to use an existing XP boot disk?

[J_D_]

I've moved an older XP boot disk into an external firewire enclosure, which mounts happily in MacOS X. Now I'd like to either boot it in VMware Fusion like a Boot Camp partition, or convert it to a virtual machine -- but I got rid of the case & motherboard from my old Windows box, so I can't run VMware Converter.

Is there any way to do this, short of reinstalling everything from scratch?

[admin]

It may be possible to set up a raw disk mapping using vmware-rawdiskCreator, but this is a somewhat advanced process. Depending on how technically savvy you are, it may be easier to reinstall from scratch. Alternately, you could borrow someone else's PC to do the conversion or to image the disk.

[J_D_]

I'm an advanced user of some things, but new to vmware...and the last time I had to mess with mount points manually was on Solaris 7.

`vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk3s1 1 ~/vmware/oldXPbox ide` seems like it should work...anything I should be concerned about? Do I need to tell OSX to unmount the drive first?

[admin · Accepted solution]

Things to keep in mind:

• I don't remember if it's oldXPbox or oldXPbox.vmdk, but I'm sure you can figure that out.

• This will just generate the .vmdk, you'll have to create a VM around it.

• If you're going to boot the partition natively, never suspend or snapshot before doing that because you'll probably corrupt the partition (Boot Camp VMs that Fusion creates prevent this for you, but if you make one yourself it doesn't have this restriction).

• You might have to repair the guest since virtual hardware looks significantly different than native hardware, and XP might not have the proper drivers installed already.

If you're never going to boot natively, you can convert the partition to a normal file-based vmdk either by installing Converter in the VM (this also allows you to resize it) or by running the raw vmdk through vmware-vdiskmanager.

[J_D_]

In this reply I'll track how it went, in case anyone else is looking for this answer in the future.

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First I ran vmware-rawdiskCreator as follows:

sudo ./vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk3 1 /Volumes/smaxtor/Virtual\ OSen/oldXPbox ide

The external drive's activity light flashed, and the desktop icon disappeared for a second and then reappeared. There was no other feedback, but it created /Volumes/smaxtor/Virtual\ OSen/oldXPbox.vmdk

Next I started VMware Fusion, and began the process of creating a new Virtual Machine. In the "Advanced disk option," I checked "Use an existing virtual disk" and directed it to the oldXPbox.vmdk file. Fusion reported "This virtual disk was created with an older VMware product," and offered to update it. I clicked on "Convert," then "Continue," continued through the process, watched it boot, and...success! Hooray!

I told the virtual XP machine to shut down so I could change settings (giving it more RAM to play with, etc) At some point in the process, the external disk's icon disappeared from my MacOSX desktop -- presumably because it belongs to the VM now.

XP requires reactivation (no surprise there), and found new hardware, but as far as I can tell everything's working fine.

Many thanks!

[admin]

At some point in the process, the external disk's icon disappeared from my MacOSX desktop -- presumably because it belongs to the VM now.

This should happen when the VM starts up in order to ensure that only one OS is controlling the drive (otherwise corruption might occur). Unfortunately Fusion doesn't currently remount the disk when the VM powers off; you can do this with Disk Utility or by disconnecting/reconnecting the drive (make sure the guest isn't using the drive!).

[J_D_]

I ran into an interesting problem with this today. The XP drive is in an external Firewire case; when I created the VM, the external drive was disk3. But today, because I didn't have my iPod plugged in, the XP drive got mounted as disk2 -- and Fusion couldn't find it.

So I repeated the steps above, calling it 'oldXPbox-disk2' instead, and everything loaded okay. Is there a better way?

[J_D_]

You know...even after all of this, there's enough brokenness in any old XP installation that the process simply wasn't worth it. Applications are crashing, the OS is locking up -- just like a native XP box!

I'm going to dump the whole thing and reinstall from scratch.