Question XP to dual boot to an already Win 10?

[King_justin]

Hello everyone,
I am wondering if I am able to create a partition on a hard drive that already has windows 10 to dual boot to xp? I'm thinking that I could dual boot to windows 10 if it already had Xp on it, so I think I'm out of luck.

If I can dual boot, does anyone have any links to some useful guides? I've done one but it has been a long time.

If I can't what is the best method to get windows xp on to a computer that already has windows 10 on it? Erase all and put windows xp? Virtual Machine? If so, is there any free one's available?


Thanks!

 

[jeremyj_83]

I would use a VM for that. If you have Win 10 Pro it has Hyper-V with it and you can turn it on. If you have Win 10 Home you can get VMware Fusion and use that to run Win XP.

 

[Satan-IR]

Usually installing XP after a Windows 10 installation would not bring good results even if you do it on another partition/drive. Doing something the wrong way can render your Windows 10 installation unbootable for example. Plus if the system hardware is relatively recent drivers would be an issue on XP.

If you need XP to run some old software/application that won't run on Windows 10 I too think virtualization is not a bad choice.

What's your system spec? In order to run virtualization smoothly your CPU needs to support hardware virtualization (VT-x on Intel or AMD-V on AMD). If CPU does not support virtualization, it would not be feasible to move in that direction.

If you want you can try virtualization software like VMWare or VirtualBox. I have used VirtualBox on several occasions to run other OSs, it's free and not difficult to setup and manage. What's more, with a virtual machine the XP or other OS is available every time you need it without the hassle of dual booting and actually having to reboot.

You can use Hyper-V too I guess, just keep in mind that since it's a native hypervisor environment on Windows, I think as long as it is installed on the system other/third-party software cannot use CPU's VT-x or AMD-V capabilities.