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Goal: add Windows XP (32-bit) bootable partition to an existing dual boot system. Ghost or clonezilla (preferable) the image of a XP desktop to the third parition.

  1. Is this possible? (assume XP drivers for the target PC are available)
  2. Is there a term \ word for ghosting a system into a multi-boot partion?
  3. Is there a good example (link \ video \ procdure) on the web?

If you have experience performing this task, please state this and the details (context) of the initial state and outcomes. Any lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid are appreciated: thank you

UPDATES

The insightful comments are appreciated: thank you. The reason to avoid XP in a VM is that it running a computationally intensive algorithm and speed is important. Target system does not use UEFI. The task the XP drive performs takes hours on a 3Ghz desktop

gatorback
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1 Answers1

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It's workable. The Ghost is an image backup/restore system. You can backup a partition and restore it to a different disk or partition. Restoring the OS to a partition is similar to installing the OS on a different partition.

The integration to Grub is the same as before. When you have multiple drives and partitions with different Operating Systems on the drives, run grub-update to add the other OS's to the grub menu.

$ sudo update-grub

Windows XP has some limitations. You may have to perform some special considerations to accommodate those limitations. You may have to boot legacy to ensure the migration. It may have other problems such as being limited to only primary partitions.

Only Windows XP 64-bit editions are supported on GPT partitions. I believe XP also has a problem with LVM partitions.

Windows XP was designed during the era of substantially lower performance hardware. With this in mind, you might consider running XP as a VM and get basically the same performance it had when it was released.

L. D. James
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