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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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