Boot muliple Windows XP versions in VMWare

[Pardus]

Trying to help someone track down some data he had on an old windows xp pc. Was able to image the drive before it died off. Most of the apps on there are very old (office 2007, aol, ms works,etc), but he needs some client info pulled from some old tax app that he doesn't know the name of.

Long story short, installed Windows XP in VmWare and restored his C-drive of XP to a separate partition in VMWare. So now all the files and folders are there, but I would like to boot to it, so he can visually tell me what he is looking for.

Problem, have tried EasyBCD to dual boot, wont work on xp. Can't find anything else that works on XP, most have a requirement of Vista+, well, I don't have Vista or a license for it.

Any ideas how to make both versions of xp dual boot ? He is very old and has no idea what the name of the app is, has to physically see it to tell me. Trying to do a favor for someone who is using a Compaq Presario 5000 POS.

The machine literally takes 20 minutes to boot up, and sounds like an airplane taking off. Trying to help him migrate over to Windows 7... man, old people are super annoying.

Any ideas are appreciated. Thanks.

 

[C1]

A confusing post to me.

If the XP was imaged, just restore it on a new/working drive on the guys Compaq.

Im guessing now that the configuration is that the Compaq now has VISTA in the first (and now probably only) partition.

Just shrink the primary VISTA partition enough to image the XP onto the working drive that now has VISTA.

Do a repair of the XP from CD then in XP's Control panel (Start up & Recovery) you should be able to setup the dual boot (ie, select which system; ie VISTA or XP is primary boot; it is easily changeable effectively at anytime).

Upon reboot, you should see a selection menu. Pretty sure that there's a way to suppress it you finally dont want that to show.

Either keep the configuration as dual boot or, when done with XP, from VISTA delete the XP partition & expand the main (or 1st) primary partition (like it was originally).


Anyways, this sort of thing happened to me and worked when I set up a dual boot XP / WIN 7 system.

Technically there is a best order for OS installation (probably should be XP first then VISTA), but ass backwards should work too.

 

[TheELF]

Very possibly XP repair is going to disappear the vista entry.
But mounting a copy* of the image in VM (checking if it will boot right away) and then doing a repair inside VM might do it.

Easybcd will work for dual boot with XP if the second OS is 7 or later,basically if the system boots from a bcd store it will work,just run it from the other OS.

*very important,you don't want to mess up your only copy

 

[takeru]

if you have the drive mounted already, why not just list everything in program files and see whats there? if it's a tax program it should stand out relatively obviously.

if you really want to boot up the old system, then do a proper p2v using vcenter converter:
https://www.vmware.com/products/converter

 

[Ketchup]

I agree with takeru. Just dump all the names of program folders you don't know into a google search. It will be much easier than bugging an old man that can't remember.

 

[William Gaatjes]

If you run vmware, you can also run the (vmware) image on another system. Then you would not have to use the old compaq.

We have done so at work and it does work. It was to run some old xp software in an isolated virtual box.