How to Dynamically Switch Between Uniprocessor and SMP during Windows XP boot

If you're running Windows XP inside a Virtual Machine such as VirtualBox, Vmware or KVM, you may want to sometimes boot with only one active CPU, other times with several CPUs. If you don't set up windows correctly, it will neither boot normally, nor in safe mode (where it will stop with a blank screen and a blinking cursor).

But you can edit your boot.ini to look like this in order to dynamically switch between one and several processors in Windows XP:
[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Pro" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Pro one processor" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /kernel=ntoskrnl.exe /HAL=Halaacpi.dll
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Pro SMP" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /kernel=ntkrnlmp.exe /hal=halmacpi.dll

No comments:

Post a Comment

I appreciate comments. Feel free to write anything you wish. Selected comments and questions will be published.