boot real xp hd as a virtual pc

[ssc801]

As I have Windows 7 Ultimate and a vhd of the original XP boot partition, I would prefer to use Microsoft Virtual PC. It would be ok to use virtual Box instead.

Is it possible to boot directly from the original partition on an external (or internal) hard drive?
If not is it possible to boot from the vhd I created of the original partition?

 

[ssc801]

A key point I forgot to mention.

The XP Bootable partition is from a 6 year old dead pc.
Both PC's use AMD multiprocessors.
The new AMD is the FX (Bulldozer) processor, which I was unable to load XP on.
I did load windows 7 and managed to get XP Mode to work in Microsoft Virtual PC.

 

[caraiman]

Microsoft Virtual PC its ok if you have a vhd image. Just install it from microsoft website and when you choose to create a new virtual machine choose the vhd file.

 

[ssc801]

Thanks Caraiman, but I suppose there are to many hardware differences in the past 6 years. I get the boot.ini menu and the option to go into safe mode. But so far any choice causes a power down of the virtual machine.

I wonder if there are any tweaks I can do to the settings file (.vmc) to allow safe mode. If I can get into safe mode I can load new drivers.

It would be exciting to create a system to allow for booting of old configurations. But not my top priority (sigh) lol