Where can I download copies of a Windows XP ISO image with Internet Explorer 6 or Internet Explorer 7 for VirtualBox?

I have Windows 7 Professional hosting Ubuntu inside VirtualBox for my development machine. To test my site, I run Internet Explorer and hit my Ubuntu box. This works great for Internet Explorer 8, the default browser on this Windows machine.

I also want to run another VM with a copy of Windows XP with Internet Explorer 6 or Internet Explorer 7.

Where can I download ISO image files of old copies of Windows XP? I've looked in Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image and these only run in Virtual PC/XP Mode which won't run while VirtualBox is running.

If I have to run VirtualBox (can't work without Ubuntu running the site), is there any way to test Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 from the same Windows 7 machine?

Answer

Using a VirtualPC VHD in VirtualBox:

1. Create a new virtual machine


2. Click Next and Enter the virtual machine name and type, clicking next again.


3. Set memory size


4. On the next page ("Virtual Hard Disk") select "Use Existing hard disk" and click the little folder icon "Choose a virual disk file" (image below)


5. Browse through the filesystem to where your VHD is stored and double click it.


6. Carry on through creating the virtual machine until you are done.

I have confirmed that this works on VirtualBox 4, I am able to download the Microsoft Windows XP image from the site you linked and run it in VirtualBox. You do get a lot of "Found New Hardware" warnings though.

Alternative: Convert VirtualPC VHD to VirtualBox VDI:

Have you tried to convert the Internet Explorer test VirtualPC VHD files to the VirtualPC VDI files? That might possibly work, but I have no way to test...

There are some instructions here which I will sum up briefly:

1. Install QEMU package (sudo apt-get install qemu)


2. Convert .vhd file: qemu-img convert -O raw myfile.vhd myfile.bin


3. 
   

   Once the file has been converted, we convert it to .vdi format using VBoxManage: VBoxManage convertfromraw myfile.bin myfile.vdi –variant standard

   
   

   Note 1: “variant” is specified to ensure we have an expandable VDI file (.bin file is 17 GB, the .vdi file will be only 1.5 GB)

   
   

   Note 2: in the previous version, “convertfromraw” command was called “convertdd”

   
   

I would assume the process is very similar for working within Windows, just install or download QEMU and run the above commands from within the QEMU/VirtualBox directories.