P2V of an existing XP machine to Hyper-V to have an emergency fallback when retiring old XP physical machines

Jeroen PluimersMay 2nd, 2015Last Updated: April 28th, 2015

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Steps

Put the SATA disk of the XP machine in a different one.
Disk2Vhd on the new machine to create a VHDX of the XP hard disk.
Install Hyper-V on the target Windows 8.1 machine (you need at least Pro for that).
Setup the base VM directory.
Setup a virtual network switch (decide if you want it to be internal, external or private, then bind it to a network adapter if needed).
Add a new VM.
Assign a new directory to it.
Assign memory to it.
Assign the virtual network switch to it.
Save it.
Edit the settings, then bind the DVD drive on the IDE controller 1 to C:\Windows\System32\vmguest.iso.
Connect to the VM.
Start it.
If you get a stop 0x0000007B (usually because of SATA/AHCI issues), then read Jon’s Project Blog » disk2vhd using UBCD for Windows to solve the issue as there is no BIOS screen in Hyper-V that allows you to switch from AHCI to SATA and back.
Note: you cannot perform UBCD4Win when you access the Hyper-V host through Microsoft Remote Desktop (the mouse will not work at all, and most keyboard shortcuts will not work either; Virtual Machine Connection Key Combinations with Hyper-V – Ben Armstrong – Site Home – MSDN Blogs does not apply).
Boot.
Register Windows (you might need to do extra work to go from OEM to Retail here).
Remove hidden devices that are not used any more and their drivers.
Setup a backup schedule.