Last time, I had taken my old XP hard drive from a previous computer and converted it to a virtual hard disk (vhd) using disk2vhd. I was able to add it to a machine in VirtualBox 4.2.6, but it wouldn't boot. I changed the disk controller from IDE to SATA, and I was able to boot, but it locked up.
Today, I checked the "Enable IO APIC" box under the System page of the VM settings. I also changed the number of CPUs from 1 to 2 to match the previous physical machine. I probably only needed to enable IO APIC.
After that, the machine booted fine and started installing new hardware from windows update. Not all of the installations were successful. My mouse did not work until some of the devices were installed.
I rebooted into safe mode to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions, including Direct3D support. To do this, I had to restart the machine multiple times until I was able to press F8 during the boot with the keyboard captured.
After installing the guest additions (as administrator), I rebooted normally. All of the devices seemed to be installed properly.
I wanted to check the video, so I first went to graphics properties. The adapter was listed as VBOX with 128 MB of memory. I had set that earlier in the virtual machine settings to 128 MB, which is the maximum allowed. I reran dxwebseup to install the latest directx, but the machine was still current.
Then I uninstalled some of the old software (video, sound, and network drivers) and rebooted.
Finally, I ran a game to see what would happen. It started pretty slowly. I had sound, so that was good. The mouse sensitivity was so far off the charts that I couldn't even get into the menus to adjust it. The problem seemed to be caused by using mouse integration. Once I disabled mouse integration, the sensitivity was back to normal.
I loaded the previous save. It took forever to load. So long that I left to get a snack. It eventually crashed. That's usually IO driven. I'll have to check the hard drive performance of the virtual drive later.
I rebooted and restarted the game. I turned off all of the graphics options and ran it in windowed 1024x768 resolution this time. It took a long time to load again, and then it crashed. I'll play around with it a little more, but it looks like a physical machine might be best in this case.
