installing Windows XP on a USB?

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I have a game that runs poorly in newer versions of Windows, so I'd like to be able to install Windows XP on a USB stick, so that my computer can boot WinXP from the USB and basically treat it as a second hard drive. Is that possible?

[edit]: My main OS is Windows 10, if that makes any difference. I was thinking about installing WinXP on my hard drive in a dual-boot setup, but I don't really wanna go that far just for a game.

No. Windows can be *installed from* a stick, but it cannot be *run from* one...and you would not be able to run XP from your current machine without first finding XP drivers for that machine anyway. There are other options, however, and you might find something here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+10+xp+mode

Can you try it in VirtualBox?

I tried, and unfortunately it ran very sluggishly. Virtualbox isn't really optimized for gaming.

What game is it?

Iji.

Installing XP to a USB stick and running it that way has been done, but is far from trivial, the second post here contains some useful links and a search at reboot.pro might also turn up something useful, expect an OS running from USB to be sluggish, especially an old one where you can't get USB3 support. If you've had no luck with VirtualBox, you might try VMWare Player, some things one will run better than the other, neither is optimized for games though.
Dual boot is probably your best option.. or hunt down an old PC someone is throwing out and put a fresh install of XP on that.

Iji was updated to version 1.7 last month.

http://www.remar.se/daniel/iji.php

The update makes it work better with Windows 10.

Thanks, but I still have issues with the sound stuttering. I tried Daniel Remar's suggested fix, which is to lower the sample rate in Windows sound settings, and that helped a little but not a lot.

I guess I'm just gonna have to partition my drive and install Windows XP. As long as I back up my computer's EFI partition and Master Boot Record that's pretty easily reversible, right?

Yes, Windows 7 or 10 should be able to fix itself as far as startup is concerned, but I doubt XP will be able to complete an installation unless UEFI and maybe even AHCI are disabled and set to "Compatability Mode" or whatever in the machine's BIOS for the duration. I do a lot of multi-boot setups and can make just about any configuration work, but inserting XP last is going to require some careful, methodical manipulation of what is already there. Most important: Be very certain beforehand that all the XP drivers needed for your machine are actually available.

PS: Adding XP to your existing boot menu can also be a bit tricky. The best way, imo, is to use bcdedit since EasyBCD modifies XP's ntldr in such a way that it will only work for as long as other EasyBCD files are there alongside it. But either way and after beginning the installing of XP, your machine would likely not re-boot to XP to finish the installation until you had gone back to Win7/10 and added the XP entry to the Win7/10 boot loader and set the BCD to default to XP.

There are other options also, but those involve Linux loaders (such as on an USB stick) and could require a lot of experimentation and tweaking to get everything working like you want.

Well leejosepho, thanks for the tips. It's clear to me that the complexity and finesse of installing XP is gonna go way beyond my comfort level, so I'd better just leave it alone. I think the game should run fine if I disable the music. I hate to play a game without music, but it's better than risking a broken computer. Thanks, everyone.

Word of warning If you have to change EFI settings for XP to boot, it'll break windows 10 booting, and if your disk is partitioned GPT (likely) then XP won't understand the partition layout (it requires MBR partitioning).

You could be into a world of hurt setting up to dual boot, and need to reinstall your main OS as well as installing XP, which is best done XP first if that's the case.

I still recommend blagging an old throw-out computer from somewhere to load XP on.

IMO, getting a dedicated retro rig for playing old games is often easier than trying to get the same games to work on a modern machine.