Preinstalled WinXP with qemu - a no-go

[quark]

Hi all,

I have two HP Compaq laptops with preinstalled WinXP Professional. In one, I let the Windows remain on the drive, whereas I removed it from the other. Both have Gentoo as the main OS, of course. As I never boot to Windows, but it could be convenient from time to time use some Windows software, I tried using qemu for this.

I read somewhere that it would be possible to boot into the preinstalled Windows using qemu and tried this with the first piece. At least I couldn't figure how it should work - I got to grub and tried to boot into Windows ending up with a black screen and a halted virtual system.

For the second, I have installed Windows XP from the recovery disks to the virtual machine some 10 times (it takes for ages to do it even once). Some times the recovery failed, sometimes it worked flawlessly. However, none of the times the installed system was usable. I even used gpart to recreate the partition table once, finding the recovery partition installed, but could not install the system from there. Another time I got nearly full install of the system but with some critical directories and files missing. This seems to give some hope for success but the 10 tries I've made were enough for me. At least for a while.

To conclude, using preinstalled Windows XP professional from existing hd partition seems to be at least very difficult, and installing Windows XP from the recovery disks to qemu virtual machine does not work.

I am amazed that they really charge money for this software which one doesn't want in the first place and can not use if would like to give it a shot once or twice. That's the way to become rich, I suppose (charging for nothing, I mean).


If someone has succeeded in which I failed, I wouldn't mind hearing how to try once (or a couple of times) more.
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HP Compaq nx9420 || Intel Core2 CPU T7200 @ 2GHz | 2Gb RAM | 120Gb HD
HP Compaq nc2400 || Intel Core Duo CPU U2500 @ 1.2 GHz | 2Gb RAM | 120Gb HD

[smerf]

What do you mean - system was not usable (after installation finally succeeded)?

It refused to boot? Halted? STOPped? Incomplete installation?

win2k needs -win2k-hack (maybe winXP too? not sure, I've never had problems with xp under qemu)
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Microsoft is not the answer, Microsoft is the question, the answer is no.

[TruGuce]

As far as booting a pre installed windows I just added config lines to my grub.conf. This is my exact conf file. I have windows on my master drive and gentoo on the slave. I have never had any problems with that.

[drwook]

quark - I wouldn't expect it to work. Grab an actual xp CD/iso rather than a recovery disk (presume you're licensed, not that it's my job to enforce that...), and install. By the way, use kqemu with qemu if you aren't already, the speed improvement is more than noticable.

Bear in mind qemu emulates certain hardware, which almost certainly won't match your physical hardware. So what you're attempting is roughly the same as ripping a hard drive out of one PC and plugging it into a non-identical machine and expecting XP to boot. Maybe you could fudge drivers and maybe replace the HAL if necessary (off the top of my head qemu doesn't support ACPI properly, or at least didn't in 0.8.1)

[quark]

Thanks for all the replies.

[quark]

[quark]

Actually... I didn't try the vmware-server package, because I forgot about it, and installed XP from an ISO image with SP2. I couldn't use my product id during the installation, but am pretty sure that I got it changed afterwards although the activation manager told me that my real, never-used key is invalid.

Probably I'll also try the vmware-server later on.
_________________
HP Compaq nx9420 || Intel Core2 CPU T7200 @ 2GHz | 2Gb RAM | 120Gb HD
HP Compaq nc2400 || Intel Core Duo CPU U2500 @ 1.2 GHz | 2Gb RAM | 120Gb HD