[discostu]

I know, and that’s stupid. Especially when they put XP mode in the OS in the first place. They SHOULD have made it so if you installed 7 on a machine with XP it would put your existing XP in as the XP mode. The overriding answer is that they screwed up and missed a good opportunity to do something easy (given how close 7 is to Vista if Vista could upgrade from XP 7 could also if they’d bothered to port the code).

[bcsco]

It's been awhile since I read it, but perhaps this link may give you some answer.

[papasmurf]

They didn’t put it into Win 7, it’s an additional installed item.

Your idea to use an existing XP install is great. In most VM’s (virtual machines, which is what XP mode uses) you can do that, it’s called raw partition access, and let’s you use an existing install. But, like you said, though, it’s too bad MS didn’t.