Based on the direction provided by Jon Thornton at his website here, I was able to download from Microsoft a virtual image of an evaluation version of Windows XP with Internet Explorer 6 installed for the purposes of evaluating how web pages look in various version of Internet Explorer. The image comes with shortcuts to IE 7 and IE8 installations for evaluation in those browsers as well. Once the image is installed in VirtualBox, it takes a little tweaking, but a fully function WinXP installation is the result.
Mr. Thornton's guide that I mentioned earlier suggested renaming the virtual disk image file downloaded from Microsoft. I found, however, that with WinRAR installed, I could open the file and extract it to the desired location.
Once the image is started in VirtualBox, the installation will want to install new hardware. One of which will be a diaglog box that comes up asking about CmBatt.sys which is located on the WinXP SP3 CD. You can cancel this dialog and prevent this event from happening every time you start the machine by disabling this device in the Windows Device Manager. This is mentioned here in another guide.
Several other new hardware installation dialog boxes come up which can be ignored. I was fortunate enough the have a WinXP SP3 CD (slipstreamed SP3 into my WinXP disk - perhaps another blog post topic), so all of the hardware dialogs found the files they needed save one. I could not get the IDE channel hardware installation box to resolve itself, so now whenever I start the machine, I have this box to ignore, by clicking Cancel. No big deal. After sorting through the hardware installation issues, I save a snapshot in VirtualBox in the event I needed to comeback and start over.
From here, the installation wanted to be activated. There was an icon in the taskbar about activation. Clicking on this icon took me to the Microsoft website which was not successful in activating the installation. However, the next time I restarted, I clicked on the dialog box that comes up before you log on asking you to activate. This takes you to the familiar screen you see when you are first installing Windows and it activates as part of the installation. I was able to activate successfully in this manner.
The result is a Windows XP installation that I can test websites and program installation on and ruin to my heart's content and start over fresh whenever I need to. How cool is that?
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