Boot another "physical" OS (e.g. Windows XP) *in a window* from within Windows 10

I just installed Windows XP on my internal SSD #4, in addition to Windows 10 on SSD #1. XP runs very well like that.

Is there any way to boot into this Windows XP installation in a window in Windows 10? Thus, similar to a virtual machine, but booted directly from the actual installation on hard drive #4?

Alternatively, could the XP install be converted to an image file (ISO, VHD...) and then both be booted directly, or using a Virtual Machine? Booting from an ISO file seems to be possible.

Solution 1:

Is there any way to boot into this Windows XP installation in a window in Windows 10?

You MUST use a Virtual Machine to do this. There is not any other way to run XP in a window inside Windows 10.

This is true (need for VM) to run any machine in a window within Windows 10.

I have an XP VM on a machine with a fast drive and it works very smoothly. Other guests (Linux and Windows) work very well this way.

At some point, a new computer will not let you boot XP as you have done in your post so you should convert the machine to virtual or make an XP Guest machine as soon as you can.

Solution 2:

You can use a Virtual Machine and then select a harddisk on your computer as drive to use that directly within the VM. There are a few things you need to remember though.

In order to do this, the drive itself, although attached, cannot be used by your Host anymore. You set it as offline first, then the VM will be able to mount it as a disk inside the VM itself and if that disk also has an OS on it, you usually can boot from it too, although, given that you already booted from it and installed it with Windows 10 on the disk, it may not boot without modifications as it will try to find the windows 10 bootloader and cannot.

So if you attempt to boot from it and it gives an error, if the Windows XP install is not containing anything useful, you may consider to reinstall it freshly.

Do note that once the VM is not running anymore, you can bring the disk back online to access it normally, but in order to use it in the VM again, you have to bring it offline first again.

EDIT based on additional question:

Yes, you can use a free program from sysinternals called disk2vhd to create a vhd image of an existing disk that can then be used in Hyper-V or VirtualBox.