This definitely falls under the “lets see if its possible” category. This morning, I decided to see if I could get away with doing a build of XP Embedded that ran underneath Virtual PC 6 on Mac OSX 10.2.3.

After some tweaking and poking around, I was finally able to get it up and running:

Yeah, I know - you’re probably asking what’s the reason for doing this? Well:

1. Because it’s there.
2. My XPE build is under 120MB. A standard XP Professional install is much larger.
3. I was just curious to see if a componentized version of XP, containing only the parts I needed ran faster on Virtual PC.

If there’s enough (any?) interest, I can post more detailed instructions on how to get this set up. Side note: I’ve used the same technique before to build versions of XPE for VMWare that runs under normal Windows XP on the PC. It’s a great way to test both your own software running on Embedded XP, as well as working out any kinks in your builds without having to use a dedicated target machine.

If you want to screw around with XP Embedded, you can order a trial version that will allow you to build images that expire in 120-days.