Windows XP Mode on QEmu on Linux

Issue

In this tutorial you can see how to extract the VHD image file of the Windows XP contained in the "Windows XP Mode".

The tutorial also explains how to run it on VirtualBox and it works nicely (no special parameter, you just add the disk).

But I want to run it on QEmu and there I get a blue screen.

This is the command I'm using:

qemu-system-i386 -m 1G --enable-kvm -drive file=VirtualXP.vhd

• I tried to convert the image to qcow2, raw, ... same issue.
• I tried x86_64... same issue.
• I tried without --enable-kvm... same issue but the blue screen is covered partly by a black rectangle.

After the blue screen it restarts and allows me to choose safe mode. But all options give this identical blue screen.

When I boot the image with VirtualBox I noticed that the VM has already a driver installed to allow the use of the host's mouse cursor. I suspect that this image has VM guest drivers installed that are not compatible with QEmu and maybe make it crashes.

Important note: I don't have a Windows XP CD-ROM to help me.

Here is a screen shot of the blue screen (I suppose it will be the exact same error on all machines):

Solution

This might have to do with the drivers windows expects, there are various results using search engines to fix/repair this issue I found but they mostly boil down to:

• Install standard IDE drivers
• Registery edit to add these IDE drivers If BSOD 0xCE
• Remove Intelppm driver
• Edit registery to reflect the removal of this CPU driver

I like the idea of a Windows XP image converted to another, for qemu. And it sounded awesome if this was a legal way. And I now know how they solved this. There is a 30 days trail period and after this, our downloaded image will nolonger boot. (unless you redo all your steps on a fresh copy that never has been started).

Sources to help you (and I ) anyway: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/troubleshoot-inaccessible-boot-device wich was to me very cryptic and what to do?

But it was also reverenced by the following more helpfull article, and i was almost capable of making a bootable harddisk image for qemu because of this: http://0x0badc0de.blogspot.com/2013/05/converting-windows-virtual-machine-from.html

But after some hours back and forth, I wasnt fully successful and even the author mentions the 30day trial. legal, maybe, but still troublesome. There is however a key included and if you where to acquire a XP install disk, maybe able to obtain a successful install of windows XP with the same 30 days trial. Hope this answer helps you or any traveler to decide their own story.

Answered By - CodeAsm