Copy the files from the host to the USB, pass the USB through to the guest, move the files and eject to pass it back. The other method I’ve used to pass software through to a guest is to use a USB thumb drive. So thankfully the “Adventures in Nostalgia” YouTube channel had a video that shows how a regedit method to work around this problem, don’t forget to leave a like. One work around is to snapshot the VM and rollback each time you wish to use it, I wasn’t a fan.

The next challenge is since Windows XP support ended there is no way to “activate” this vanilla of windows any more which is right painful. Once the Guest additions were installed, everything worked as expected. I’m currently using a Windows 10 host and the only trouble I had was with the mouse, where I could not control the mouse within the Guest correctly, but you can temporarily disable the VirtualBox “mouse integration” feature to get around this until the VirtualBox Guest Additions are installed. I followed this guide closely, there are a few steps you needed to pay attention too but otherwise this went smoothly. The download link from the Microsoft site has disappeared, but the alternative link from the CNET site was working at the time of this post. I found the following setup guide very useful from Help Desk Geek website ( click).

Turns out this was easier than I expected. The Motorola CPS software is from around the same time, so it was an ideal candidate to try. I remember when Windows 7 was first released Microsoft released a version of Windows XP that would run within Microsoft Virtual PC. So the only alternative was to experiment with an older version of Windows in a virtual machine and passing through a serial port. I could not get the CPS software to “read device” instead receiving a timeout. There is something fundamental in the RS232 32-bit sub-system within the CPS software that prevents this from ever working. I’ll spare you the gory details, but not amount of compatibility mode twiddling or research would result in a working system. So rather than go looking for further ancient hardware I started experimenting if Motorola CPS would run on a Windows 10 64-bit platform. My immediate thought was “yikes what do I use now to program these Motorola radios” ? However my trusty old Windows XP laptop, with a real serial port fried its motherboard recently never to boot again. I still have a number of UHF Motorola MTS2000 handhelds which once given new batteries have proven themselves useful time and time again. It is no secret that Motorola CPS software does not like to run on modern operating systems.

Motorola cps software compatiablity