Not initialised

I will take a look, thank you. I have inserted the XP installation disk. I can now see this on my C drive Win 10:



and this in Hyper-V Manager:

SteveHigh said:

I will take a look, thank you. I have inserted the XP installation disk. I can now see this on my C drive Win 10:

You need to boot the VM from this CD in order to do the install. In the Settings for this VM you can connect its DVD drive to the host machine's physical CD/ DVD drive.



(the option is greyed out in this example only because the host machine doesn't have an optical drive)

Yes, so this is the blank hard drive (that can grow to 127GB), and it's called XP_Machine. It always starts out as 4,096KB. BTW: you have a second hard drive file for whatever reason that is now 36GB in size).


Now in the properties of that VM, you will have a DVD drive (you may have to hit the add hardware button to get it), and this is where you attach that ISO file...which contains the media that you will use to install Windows XP onto that blank hard drive above. In my example, I have the Server 2019.iso file mounted on my VM.



When you first start up the VM, it should prompt to start the WIndows XP installation. It will be installing into that 4,096KB XP_Machine.vxhd file from the above screenshot.

pparks1 said:

...in the properties of that VM, you will have a DVD drive (you may have to hit the add hardware button to get it), and this is where you attach that ISO file....

The OP has a physical CD, not an ISO. But as I showed above, that too can be attached here (at least, it can for a Gen. 1 VM).

Oh, I thought he said here that he had an ISO file as well as a physical disk

This is what I see now



I will take a look again a bit later. many thanks to you all for your patience

SteveHigh said:

This is what I see now...
I will take a look again a bit later. many thanks to you all for your patience

Try again, then click 'See details' at the bottom of that message. That usually makes it clear what the problem is. Post a screenshot of the details if it's not clear to you.

What we can see is that it does say that the Hypervisor is not running. Is virtualisation enabled in the bios?

Virtualisation is enabled. If I go to Task Manager | Performance, I can see it:

SteveHigh said:

Virtualisation is enabled. If I go to Task Manager | Performance, I can see it:

Your Hypervisor is not running. Check that you have installed all the Hyper-V features, including the Hypervisor.