convert physical drive to virtual drive for virtual pc

photodudephotodude Salt Lake, Utah Member
edited December 2009 in Science & Tech
So I have this crazy Idea of trashing some old computers that have legacy programs. Since I just upgraded to Win7pro-64bit I jumped on XPM and did some digging only to find my legacy apps don't work in XP.

So that lead me to the idea of converting a physical drive to a virtual drive for virtual pc. Why start fresh and reinstall, possibly losing some licensed software, when I could just migrate. In trying to figure out how to ghost a physical drive to a VHD I came across WinImage a shareware program that claims to be able to go from PHD to VHD or from VHD to PHD. Among other things. If it works this will solve one issue.

Second task will be after making the migration, will be to lock out the migrated OS from the internet, and maybe the local network. (easy stuff)

I'm moving the physical hard drive and os from a Win98se computer.

Anyone familiar with winimage? or have suggestions on making the big move to virtual?

I'll follow up with my experiance on this post as I make the move in the next few weeks.

Comments

  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited December 2009
    I have no experience do it that way. But I've done exactly what you are doing before using Ghost and Virtualbox. Create the ghost image then create a new virtual machine make it boot ghost and then use ghost to copy the backup to the new machine.
  • photodudephotodude Salt Lake, Utah Member
    edited December 2009
    good to hear that Ghost is a great way to port a physical drive to virtual drive.

    Just got done with my first run of WinImage to port a Win2k-pro drive via usb2 external adaptor. Image took about 1hour to complete the VHD file. after condecting the VHD file to windows virtual PC I tried booting up. got to the starting windows 2000 screen and the virtual system hangs. tried again to boot to safe mode and it hangs.

    I see two issues: first, win2k is not offically supported in windows virtual PC. Second, The win2k drive was on a P4b intel system and I'm running windows virtual PC on an PhIIx4 AMD system. I'm guessing it's hanging due to the difference in drivers and CPUs.

    The other two drives I was going to try this with are on an AMD Athlon (generation1) So I may have some better luck getting that to boot. I'll be trying win98se and linux unbuntu.

    For fun I'll try a vista drive as well (one that has run on a AMD and maybe one that ran on a intel p4)
  • photodudephotodude Salt Lake, Utah Member
    edited December 2009
    one hour later I'm done creating my second drive image with winimage from a 40GB drive with 2 partitions one for win98SE and one for linux ubuntu.

    everything looks good....but again the virtual OS's hang at the OS load screen. both win98se and Ubuntu (kernal 2.6.15-28-386).

    leason learned from this convertion, winimage one sees physical drives. If you have a partition on the drive with two OS's you'll get one VHD file just like the physical drive with two partitions in the VHD.
  • photodudephotodude Salt Lake, Utah Member
    edited December 2009
    Looks like ubuntu (kernal 2.6.15-28-386). made it a little father in my current test, it started booting but dropped to a shell after device 1 came back invalid (0x89) with alert /dev/bdb2 does not exist
  • photodudephotodude Salt Lake, Utah Member
    edited December 2009
    after a little work I can get win98se into safe mode, but not into normal boot. win2k hangs on all options or crashes the virtual machine. and I think the old ubuntu is corupted as I can no longer boot to it on the physical drive. I think I'll ghost the win98se partition and dump the ubuntu part.

    overall I'm thinking there must be driver conflicts or issues with the CPU changes from the phyisical machines to the virtual machines.
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited December 2009
    Is there a reason why you are using VirtualPC. There's a lot better alternatives to it out there VMWare, Parallels and VirtualBox. VMware has some free editions. Parallels has an extremely fast version out if your hardware supports it. VirtualBox is getting significantly better with each release and it's free. I use VMWare on servers at work. Parallels on my Mac and Virtualbox on my computers for modeling things. They have their difference but they are all extremely well supported and robust.

    They are all better then VirtualPC which is dead. Their core strengths is that they are significantly better at modeling a virtual hardware environment and are OS agnostic.
  • photodudephotodude Salt Lake, Utah Member
    edited December 2009
    The only reason I'm using the NEW Windows Virtual PC is it came with Win7 Pro and XPmode. It was also free. (I understand there are some differences in the discontinued Microsoft Virtual PC and the new Windows Virtual PC this is my first experience doing any type of VM work) I may consider other VM Software but for the moment I'll continue with what I have on hand.

    in addition to the CPU issues I think there is an issue with the fact these OS's came from IDE drives and I'm running SATA in AHCI
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited December 2009
    Yes that would cause a problem but you should be able to change the setting from sata in ahci to ide for the virtual machine settings.
  • photodudephotodude Salt Lake, Utah Member
    edited December 2009
    There are almost no adjustable settings with in windows virtualPC as far as I can tell. i even opened the virtual Bios and took a look there. I'll keep digging to see what I can find.
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