Windows 7 XP Mode files lost in upgrade to Windows 10

Question

I finally set aside the time to do my Windows 10 upgrade from Windows 7 at the weekend. 4 hours later it all seemed successful apart from a little glitch (which is now fixed) in terms of the PC not shutting down. However one thing I didn't think in advance about was the XP Mode I used for some old software. Today, I used Hyper V to set up a XP Mode on Windows 10 but can't find all the data and programs that were available in XP Mode on Windows 7. Could I have lost them? I don't have any sort of back up for the data I had on the Windows 7 XP Virtual disk - more fool me. I have found one *.vhd file on the C: drive but this is dated 2009 and so I figure that this is not much use. I can't link it in the Hyper V set-up anyway as it is Read Only and can't be changed, even with Administrator's privileges. Any ideas?

Answer 1

The XP mode VM is stored in AppData (%LocalAppData%/Microsoft/Windows Virtual PC/Virtual Machines/Windows XP Mode.vhd to be specific).

There is a whole Microsoft article on how to recover your XP mode data if you upgraded to Windows 8 or 10. The gist of the article is to right click the VHD file, choose the Mount option and then browse the files inside.

Here's the article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2724115