My HP system was purchased with WinXP Home installed. I have the recovery set of CDs.
I have Fedora installed on a separate hard drive with (grub) multiple boot.
I also have VBox with WinXP as host and Fedora as guest.
I would like to know if I can (with appropriate backups) remove everything and install VBox with Fedora as host and then, with the WinXP CDs that I have, install WinXP as guest.
My primary use for XP is to run Quicken. I can do everything else on Linux.
HP told me that the recovery CDs will wipe everything, removing any new partitions, etc. and so is not an appropriate installation medium. In other words, go out and buy the MS installation set, which I'm obviously not considering.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Dick

Hi, and welcome to LQ.

I had this problem with an acer, last month, it also came with a set of cd's that were a recovery set not an installation set.

I had to get a copy of winxp and slip stream the sata driver, as the acer driver was not in the windows driver set.

Imagine my confoundment when winxp could not find the harddrive, but live boot cd's could.

Then you'll have activation issues with M$. You can get around it, but to use your own number(m$-key) you'll need to match the number within the microsoft setup docs (oem). Just google stlipstreaming winxp, there's some good tutes out there, but one I found automated the process really well. nlite... (it took me 4 days to find it)

http://www.nliteos.com/

Once you have your winxp install set, you can install fedora and vBox.

Use the non-ose vBox edition (has usb support) and you'll have near everything you need to get quicken up and running.

cheers, Glenn

Thanks very much. Sounds overwhelming! I don't know if you saw the other answer I got that suggested the use of vmdk. I have looked at the web site and it looks much easier. The only thing that frightens me a little is I don't want to crash and lose years worth of effort on MS.

chores, Dick

Have you tried to run quicken with wine?

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...rsion&iId=8113

There have been some positive reports...

See how you go...

Regards, Glenn

Or you can try CrossOver (the commercial port of WINE)
Or Gnucash in Linux

I second that. It's been years now that Quicken has been available natively for linux. You shouldn't dual boot just for quicken. I am absolutely sure that you can run Quicken on Linux.

I would spend the time trying to run WINE, or use CrossOver. That is the most sensible option to me, since that was what CrossOver was designed for.