[dba-Tech] New virtual drive

Mr. President,

I am honored, sir, to offer my poor knowledge to help you out!

This applies to Microsoft Virtual PC.

I used two free products to create VHDs from existing *Windows XP
Pro*systems: WinImage (
http://www.winimage.com/download.htm) and Sysinternals Disk2vhd (
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx).  When I ran
these programs on my old workstations, I simply saved the VHDs on my main
system over the network.

Then I created the VMs and used an ISO of the Windows XP installation disk
on each VM to do a repair installation of XP.  I presume that you know that
that DOESN'T mean that first "repair" or recover choice on the first Windows
installation screen.  You have to pick a regular install of Windows...then
the installation program detects that a version of Windows already exists
and that you want to repair the existing installation.

Those are the two basic steps.  I had a hell of a time with my second
attempt at doing this since the physical workstation's hard disk had
registry errors.  But after I ran PCTools Registry Mechanic, I used Disk2vhd
to make the VHD and then successfully did a Windows repair and voilá!

I tried doing the same process with an old Windows 95 laptop but I haven't
been successful.  Maybe a repair installation of Windows 98 would work, I
don't know from personal experience.  I, like Drew, have got multiple
Windows VMs: Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, and 7 to go along with the two
"conversion" VMs I mentioned.  I also have a DOS VM I made with Drew's help.
Installing those versions of Windows and DOS was pretty straightforward.

For older versions of Windows I did need to use the older version of
Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 to get the Virtual Machine Additions to work.

Does that help?

I would also say that DOS apps run well under Windows XP, even ones that use
memory-resident utilities.  Windows 98 ran DOS apps better than Windows 2000
did, but XP outshines either by a long way.

Regards,

Steve Erbach
Neenah, WI

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 10:30 AM, John Bartow <john at winhaven.net> wrote:

> Hi Steve,
> What technique do you use for doing this?
>
> I am doing a job this week where I'm setting up VPC VMs on a new XP
> machine.
>
> The client currently runs a number of DOS apps on a Win98 PC.
>
> My plans are to create a DOS VM and copy the DOS apps/files over to it and
> see if I can skip Win98 altogether. But there may also be some little used
> applications on this PC that may require Win98. The problem is that this is
> a production machine and I can't have the time with it to determine this
> until I get the apps/files/hardware all working for the DOS programs which
> are vital to daily ops. Once that is accomplished I can determine if I need
> to image the HD and create a Win98 VM.
>
> I was planning on using Acronis for imaging the HD and converting to a
> Win98
> VM this but would welcome any suggestions.
>
> John B.
>
>