Running Windows XP on modern virtual machines is easier than doing likewise with Windows 98, so surely migrating an existing physical Windows XP machine to a virtual machine should also be easier, right? Wrong, surprisingly it’s actually harder!
So, what’s the problem? At boot, you get a blue screen of death error: stop 0x0000007b (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE). This indicates that Windows XP is unable to access the hard drive because of a driver error.
So, here’s the problem. Windows XP hard-codes the IDE disk controller name into the disk driver during boot, and if that changes, like during a migration to a virtual machine, Windows XP will fail the check and refuse to boot. Luckily, there are ways to relax the stringentness of the checking so that it will be flexible enough to boot under a new hardware platform.
The other issue is that you’ve got to be careful about changing aspects of ACPI availability, IO APIC, and so on. There is a specific HAL driver configured for a particular machine, and again if this changes, Windows XP will refuse to boot.
The VirtualBox article provides a good overview of the overall process.
20200106/DuckDuckGo windows xp qemu stop 0x0000007b
20200106/https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/324103/advanced-troubleshooting-for-stop-error-code-0x0000007b-inaccessible-b
20200106/DuckDuckGo migrate windows xp to virtual machine
20200106/https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows
But, now the question is, how do you change the Windows registry of
another machine without booting into it? The registry editor in
Windows XP and up allows you to load a hive from an external file for
editing, so you can mount the disk and use a different copy of Windows
to make the changes. But how do you make changes without using
Windows at all? There is the chntpw tool that allows you to edit
Windows registry files from the command line, and it is also possible
to use Python libraries to make similar edits.
On the proprietary software side of affairs, still another clever way to do this is to use a “Mini Windows XP” bootable CD. And another way is to use a Debian-based “PCregedit” disk that has a proprietary GTK+ GUI tool for changing the Windows registry. Alas, the website of the freeware tool is long gone, only available on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, so don’t even bother asking about where the source code is for the live CD.
20200106/DuckDuckGo windows regedit second disk
20200106/https://jchornsey.wordpress.com/2015/03/11/accessing-another-windows-computers-registry-from-a-disk-in-windows-8-1/
20200106/https://www.raymond.cc/blog/how-to-edit-windows-registry-key-values-without-booting-in-windows/
20200106/DuckDuckGo mini windows xp
20200106/https://us.informatiweb.net/tutorials/it/1-articles/60–hiren-boot-cd-mini-windows-xp.html
20200106/DuckDuckGo linux edit windows registry
20200106/https://mashtips.com/how-to-edit-the-windows-registry-using-ubuntu/
20200106/DuckDuckGo pc regedit live cd
20200106/https://lifehacker.com/fix-the-windows-registry-from-a-linux-thumb-drive-5584762
20200106/https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=6928
20200106/https://web.archive.org/web/20100108194412/http://www.pcregedit.com/