Opening a seperate hard drive with different OS via VPC - possible

Finally comfortable with Windows 7 and have left XP Behind. However, Im
keeping my wife and kids on a XP pro using dual boot with Windows 7 and XP on
completely separate hard drives. Is there a way to virtualize the XP hard
drive and make it accessible within Windows 7 so we dont have to log to dual
boot each time? My first few attempts have failed and resulted in the VPC
screen launching with some a DOS screen and some info flying by. Then it
gets stuck at an acquiring DHCP address message with this symbol | spining.
Any thoughts? Many thanks!

Hello A,

> Finally comfortable with Windows 7 and have left XP Behind. However,
> Im keeping my wife and kids on a XP pro using dual boot with Windows 7
> and XP on completely separate hard drives. Is there a way to
> virtualize the XP hard drive and make it accessible within Windows 7
> so we dont have to log to dual boot each time? My first few attempts
> have failed and resulted in the VPC screen launching with some a DOS
> screen and some info flying by. Then it gets stuck at an acquiring
> DHCP address message with this symbol | spining. Any thoughts? Many
> thanks!
>

You can P2V the Windows XP system and then leverage Windows Virtual PC to
boot your now virtual XP system. Otherwise, you could simply use XP mode
to create a virtual XP machine of your existing Windows 7 environment and
restore any information from the seperate hard disk to this VM. Either solution
will allow you to run both operating systems simultaneously.

On Mon, 1 Mar 2010 06:23:01 -0800, A Gunslinger
<> wrote:

>Finally comfortable with Windows 7 and have left XP Behind. However, Im
>keeping my wife and kids on a XP pro using dual boot with Windows 7 and XP on
>completely separate hard drives. Is there a way to virtualize the XP hard
>drive and make it accessible within Windows 7 so we dont have to log to dual
>boot each time? My first few attempts have failed and resulted in the VPC
>screen launching with some a DOS screen and some info flying by. Then it
>gets stuck at an acquiring DHCP address message with this symbol | spining.
>Any thoughts? Many thanks!

What this means is that you don't have a bootable disk. The DHCP boot
screen is the last option VPC will try, a network boot.

How are you copying the hard drive to a VHD?
FYI, You can't boot directly from a hard drive in VPC.

Keep in mind also that VHDs for VPC are limited to 127GB, if your HD
is bigger than that you will need to resize it to 127GB. While you an
mount a larger VHD it will not work correctly.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/
http://smudj.wordpress.com/