VMLite - an alternative Windows XP Mode impl

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.

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

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

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.