Create VDI or VMDK from folder

[quadrplax]

Here's my situation: I'm following a tutorial this tutorial that I cannot create link to since this is my first post: {wwwDOTvirtualboxDOTorgSLASHwikiSLASHMigrate_Windows} to convert my 15 year old Windows 98 computer into a Virtual Machine. I copied all of the files into a folder on my computer. (which took a long time, despite it being under 3GB in total, old computers are slow) Anyways, I don't know where to go from there. From the looks of it I need to download a program to convert a folder to iso, then another one to make it a vdi/vmdk, or I need to make a partition on a hard drive and copy everything there. Is there any simple and straightforward way of doing this?

[mpack]

I'm afraid you've wasted your time. You can't turn a collection of files into a bootable virtual drive, and creating an ISO is pointless unless you also intend to write an installer app to go on it.

The whole disk needs to be imaged at a sector level, not partition and file level. Unfortunately I don't know what disk imaging software is available for Win98. You can probably find a version of "dd for Windows" that works, creating a raw file which you would then convert using CloneVDI. The only other thing I can think of is to boot a recent version of Acronis from the Acronis CD and use it to image the hd to VHD format. It must be a recent version since e.g. Acronis 2009 couldn't create VHDs.

Someone may recommend Disk2VHD, but I doubt that will work on Win98, and may not like FAT32 drives either.

And this may all be moot anyway. The VM will offer different hardware, and Win98 is much less tolerant of hardware changes than e.g. XP. Basically, being tolerant of hardware changes means strong support for plug and play, and that support was still quite weak in Win98s day. At the very least you need to have the Win98 setup CD handy.

Oh - and Win98 is not a supported guest in VirtualBox, so no Guest Additions which means no integrated mouse, no decent graphics, no easy shared folders.

[dlharper]

Depending on what hardware you have available, you might be able to create a raw image by plugging your hard disk in as a second hard disk on another machine which is running Linux or a more recent version of Windows. You could then use dd as suggested to create an image file. Whether you can do that, though, will depend on connections. A Windows 98 disk is likely to have an IDE connection, whereas a more modern machine is likely to use SATA. Some XP machines are IDE, though, and some motherboards provide both.

However, as mpack points out, whether the result will work in VirtualBox is by no means certain. It is a suck-it-and-see situation.

All-in-all I would be inclined to install Win98 from scratch on the virtual machine. This can be a bit fiddly, but follow the tutorials, such as the one at viewtopic.php?f=28&t=59559, and the result actually works remarkably well. After that, copy your files across, perhaps using a USB stick.