Full use of the installed Windows XP both in normal mode and in a virtual machine under another OS

Question

Virtualization

There is an ordinary Windows XP SP3 installed on an ordinary hard drive and it works fine.
I want to run this very installation in VMWare (or any other virtualization system) from under Windows 7 installed next door, and use a physical disk as a container.

In general, doing this is not a problem, but there is a huge minus: the set of hardware from the point of view of WinXP when launched in a virtual machine and on hardware will be radically different.
1. Will she go crazy from this?
2. How easy will switching be? I suspect that it will constantly break the tower, at least because of the hardware RAID, four video cards and four monitors (which, of course, will not happen in a virtual machine). Will it be enough just to reboot several times on the hardware so that the OS recognizes all the devices again and works as it should, or can it live and not come out of such a reboot?
3. I remember that in Windows XP (I didn’t find this in the seven for some reason) there is a certain feature that allows you to remember various hardware configurations and at boot there will be a choice which one to boot into now. Has anyone tried this functionality, does it even work? Out of the corner of my ear, again, I heard that it is intended only for peripherals, but not for the main system devices. How true is this?

Or do I still have no choice and will have to create a copy of the partition with WinXP as a separate container for the virtual machine and put up with an actually duplicate partition?

Answer 1

My Computer -> Properties -> Hardware -> Hardware Profiles -> create two profiles for virtual machine and real hardware.
At startup, you will have to select a profile
. Once I even tried this option on a desktop machine, the rake will be with crooked drivers, which, in addition to the driver, also install a service and some program in the tray, so they can blow their heads off.
ps I doubt that this way of using windows xp is licensed legal.

Answer 2

By the way, in order to put the axis on a real hard (and use it) from under the seven (and whists) in VmWare, you need to block the hard. Otherwise, VmWare will swear that there is no access. We block with this is-office.ru/LockDismount0300.zip

Answer 3

and what is the point of such a persistent attempt to step on a rake with drivers? :) Since the virtual hardware is very different from the real one, then the tasks, as I understand it, are very different. Why not do a clean install in the virtual machine on the same virtual disk?

Answer 4

Please let me know the results, I'll give it a try too :)

Answer 5

1. when using the Mac feature called BootCamp and a virtual machine (VBox, VMware, Parallels), there were no special problems