Update: Details about Portable CE 3.0 are now online.

In the a post the other day, I mentioned that I was going to experiment a bit with portable drives, virtual machines and Windows XP. For now, I’m calling the experiment “Portable XP” (akin to Portable CE).

The “goal” of the experiment was to see how easy it would be to create a “portable” virtual machine image of Windows XP that I could put on a USB flash or hard drive. In the end, it turned out to be rather simple.

My first thought was to use either VMWare Player or Virtual PC, but both of these “break” one of the cardinal rules in my book - they both have heavy reliance on the registry, and really need to be installed on the host machine. After some research (i.e. - search Google), I came across an open source VM called QEMU that was not only built for Windows but for a wide variety of platforms. And the best part: no install required. So I decided to give it a shot.

Here’s how I ended up building my “image”:

1. Download QEMU for Windows and unzip to a folder on your hard drive (I’d recommend using the HD during install for speed.)
2. Create an ISO image from a Windows XP install disk. I used Nero to do this, but any ISO tool should be fine. For this example, I called it “WindowsXP.iso”.
3. Open a command prompt, and go to where you unzipped QEMU. You’ll need to go ahead and create a hard drive image first, and I chose to make it about 3gb:
   qemu-img create portablexp.img 3G
4. Start up the VM and boot from the XP install disk ISO:
   qemu -L . -m 512 -boot d -hda portablexp.img -cdrom WindowsXP.iso
5. Follow your normal Windows XP install. I chose to quick format the partition as NTFS.
6. Once the entire install was completed, I shutdown the VM and copied the entire folder (not including the XP install ISO) to a portable USB drive.
7. To run the VM, from the command prompt, you plug your USB drive into any Windows machine, and can simply type:
   qemu -L . -m 512 -boot c -hda portablexp.img
8. That’s it.

Now granted, running the VM off a USB drive isn’t the fastest way to boot XP. But one thing I liked about QEMU is that there’s bits for Linux, Windows and even Mac. I would imagine (but havent tried) that the drive image should work between the various versions.

At this point, I doubt I would change over my machine to use Virtual PC, VMWare or QEMU. None of them seem to have nearly the speed that Parallels has, but I’m sure that future versions will get more usable once they use true processor virtualization.

Anyways - it was an interesting little experiment, which really did achieve what I wanted to do: create a self contained VM that I could walk around with and boot on various machines. I’d be curious to hear if anyone else plays with this and their thoughts on it. One last note: You should be able to “slim down” your XP install in the VM with tools such as “XP Lite“. The install of the bits (including the page file) was just under 2GB - using one of these tools might be able to get the image down to a size that runs off a keychain fob.