James Bannan25 December 2008, 12:00 PM
How to run Windows XP inside Mac OS X free of charge, without paying for Parallels or VMware. Our step-by-step tutorial has all the answers!
Page 3 - Step 3 - Create New XP VM
Click the New icon to start the New Virtual Machine Wizard,
- Click Next
- Type in "Windows XP" as the name and select "Microsoft Windows" from the "OS Type" dropdown menu and "Windows XP" from the "Version" list. Click Next
- Assign as much memory as you like beyond the base memory recommendation. In this case 192MB is the recommended amount. Click Next
- On the "Virtual Hard Disk" screen, click "New" to launch the Create New Virtual Disk Wizard, and click Next.
- Choose whichever disk type you prefer. The advantage of a fixed-size image is that as all the space is reserved up front, there's an ongoing disk performance benefit as the image doesn't need to keep expanding as you use it. The downside is that all the space is used at once and it takes longer to create. Click Next
- Name the image file accordingly and assign some space (at least 10GB for the XP boot disk). Click Next, and then Finish. The newly-created Windows-Vista.vdi is now attached to the VM as the primary disk. Click Next and then Finish, and the VM is created
To install XP from the media, you'll need to attach the physical optical drive to the VM so that the VM can read from the CD.
To do this, highlight the XP VM within VirtualBox and in the right-hand window click on "CD/DVD-ROM".
Another window opens up - tick the checkbox next to "Mount CD/DVD-ROM" and make sure that "Host CD/DVD Drive" is selected, then click OK.
Make sure that the XP CD is in the drive and start the VM by clicking on the Start button. The VM will read from the optical drive and load the XP CD.
Highlight the Windows XP VM and click Start. With no operating system present the VM will automatically boot into the Windows XP setup procedure.
To interact with a VM, you have to click into the window which contains the running instance. Doing this will "capture" the keyboard and mouse. You won't be able to interact with the Mac desktop, but you will be able to interact with the VM. To escape back to the Mac desktop click the Host key. For VirtualBox on OS X, the Host key is mapped to the Left Command button.
This is the default behaviour on all VirtualBox VMs, but you can enable seamless integration by installing guest addition tools, which we'll do once XP has been installed.
On the "Welcome to Setup" screen, press Enter, then press F8 on the Licensing Agreement page.
Select "Unpartitioned space" on the available disk and press Enter to install, then on the next page choose the top option - "Format the partition using the NTFS file system (quick)" and press Enter.
Windows XP will now format the partition and copy the setup files across. You won't be prompted for input until the system restarts and boots into the graphical mode setup.
When the graphical setup loads, the first screen is the Regional aned Language Options window. Choose your preferences and click Next.
Type in your name and organisation (if necessary) and click Next.
Type in the product key and click Next.
Type in the computer name you want to assign to the VM system and a password for the built-in Administrator account, then click Next.
Choose the appropriate time and date options for your locale and click Next.
Setup will continue and then install the networking components. make any changes if you need to and click Next. Type in workgroup or domain credentials if needs be, and click Next.
That's all the user input required - Windows XP will now complete the installation and the system will reboot.