VMLite - an alternative Windows XP Mode impl

[Night Hawk]

I still have a few old boats around here with 98 and one case I have to clean off for an XP/98 dual boot since the board and remaining hardwares never saw Vista updates.

 

[huisinro]

Thanks, seems still some needs for converting windows 98/Me to vm. These two systems have very different kernel driver architecture than NT/XP series. Quite hard to make the virtual disk driver to work on 98/Me. There could be 2 conversions, first convert live disk to some intermediate format, then cpnvert to virtual disk format on a newer PC where vm will be running.

 

[Night Hawk]

It would be something to see an older Fat based version running on VM on the 64bit 7 simply to run some of the real old stuff! I've been contemplating formatiing a usb flash drive here to Fat 16 to see if I could get a 95 or 98 installation to go on using the Portable Virtual Box there if that will even run on anything older then Fat 32 which would limit that to 98.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there

Try Windows 3.11 on a vm on a USB stick.

To create the vm get the windows 3.11 image from Technet - it's STILL there believe it or not and then in your vm mount the image as a Virtual floppy and boot to install the OS. (vmware workstation)

I haven't tried the latest version of vmware workstation - you need to ensure that the Virtual Bios can support booting from a floppy disk to initially create the vm.

The usb stick also needs to be FAT formatted (not sure about whether this HAS to be done as the virtual I/O should handle all this stuff).

I did have this working a while ago but I created the vm when I was running Windows XP.

Actually I don't think the USB stick has to be FAT formatted -- I've got a NTFS formatted usb stick which has a Linux VM on it which I run from W7 X-64 - so the Virtual Bios / Virtual Application software obviously handles all the I/O calls.


Cheers
jimbo

 

[Night Hawk]

Download from TechNet? I don't think so. Besides I still have 3.1 sitting on a set of 3.5" floppies here already. I'm more inclined to try 95 or 98 there however since those are on cd.

 

[darkassain]

he meant 3.11 which is one lower from 3.1...

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
the trouble with a floppy disk installation is that unless you have a physical device (I actually have an old USB floppy disk device which is bootable) you might have problems ejecting / mounting a new disk from an image that the windows installation will be able to access.

However as far as the FAT device is concerned -- not an issue since it's the VIRTUAL internal disk that the guest sees that needs to be formatted correctly.

To the HOST W7 installation this is just a "bog standard" application file which can be created on the Host's file system whatever it is.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[Night Hawk]

he meant 3.11 which is one lower from 3.1...

Unfortunately that also requires a TechNet subscription in order to download anything there. As floppy drives I have an internal drive in a 3.5" to 5.25" adapter that came with the case here before ending up with several flash drives since the system was first built.

 

[huisinro]

Since there are still demands on converting Windows 95/98/Me physical machines to virtual machines, we have spent quite some efforts to implement a VxD virtual disk driver for these old systems. Using this driver, you can mount .vmdk, .vhd, and .vdi image file on 95/98/Me PCs, after that performing live P2V is very easy. Will provide the disk utilities as free download after more testing. Our P2V covers all Windows systems, from 95 to Windows 7.

 

[Night Hawk]

That will be something to have a look at once you have it far enough along. I seem to have ended up with some spare drive space for testing anyways!

 

[huisinro]

Great. I will post the virtual disk driver once I think stable. Basically, you can manually convert to a vm. This are the steps on Windows 98:

(1) mount a .vhd or .vmdk file using our VxD driver, this will add extra hard disk to the PC
(2) run FDISK to partition the 2nd disk
(3) xcopy all files from C: drive to the virtual disk

That's about it, the virtual disk can be moved to another pc to run as a vm

 

[Night Hawk]

First off you have to be able to run fdisk from a floppy drive due to how the old dos files worked through an ide controller. I doubt fdisk would even see any vhd. That's where a big problem comes up. You would need to mount a floppy image most likely.

 

[huisinro]

Very good points, will add supports to mount floppy images.

On Windows 98, seems to be working well, after mounting a vhd, fdisk can recognize it.

On Windows 95, need to manaully enable "Int 13 unit" to the disk by right clicking properties inside device manager. After this extra steps, fdisk recognize it, and you can partition/format the virtual disk.

 

[Night Hawk]

You will likely need to prepare a step by step guide on how to get fdisk running along with a few other proceedures once you have something ready to try out. Gee? I guess I now have to relearn all those dos commands again after all these years! :roflmao:

 

[huisinro]

I also hate to work on old stuff, especially backporting XP code to Windows 95/98 is not most exciting work. However, there seems to be no support at all for live physical to virtual machine conversation on 95/98/Me/NT. We want our VMLite converter to be complete in the spectrum, so we take efforts to support these old systems.

We will provide an automatic tool that does everything. Only if you want to try manual steps, you will need to go through those old DOS commands.

 

[Night Hawk]

You would need to included some form of gui managed rather then dos command to see fdisk mounted and run with an options list with precode instructions to avoid using something on the idea of DOSBox for that. A command line interface similar to the Run in Windows would be a thought since the setup.exe file would be started for the old Windows installer there once the vhd was all set to go.

 

[huisinro]

Yes, a GUI wizard will be provided for the conversion. It will have options to generate VMLite/VirtualBox/VMWare/Virtual PC format.

For a Vista PC with 250G hard disk, it takes about 5 hrs to convert the physical machine to a virtual machine.

For old PCs with smaller disks, should be faster. For example, a Dell XP machine with 40G takes about 30 mins, not too bad.

 

[Night Hawk]

It would take about 10hrs. for a Vista installation here if I end up seeing that back on one of the 500gb drives used here according to that. For something like 3.1 or 9x that would be only 2gb tops seen there.

 

[huisinro]

yes, that's about the right estimate. We are using USB 2.0 external hard disks. Firewire and eSATA shoud be faster.

The disk size refers to the used space, not the total capacity. Our program will only clone the used sectors. Free space doesn't matter.

We are also trying to recognize Linux file systems, Ext2/3 and ReiserFS, in case the machine contains multiple boots.

 

[Night Hawk]

The one problem I see with the pre 98 stuff of course is usb. 98 needed separate support there for USB 1.0, 1.1 where XP saw 2.0 support included.

When you are working with old 3.5" floppies and old 9x cds you still need some type of direcct access means for optical and floppy drives until the OS is installed on the vhd itself unless you are simply trying to convert an existing installation into a vhd environment as you were mentioning before.

Most of all that required access to ide controllers at first since that's how the fdisk and setup.exe files were written. You need to trick the old installers for this like you see when custom installing the 32bit 7 for example like I did here seeing that go onto the former Vista vhd right when as the VPC was starting which detected and autoloaded the 7 installer or booted the live cd for Linux.