glnz wrote:If I figure out how to use Knoppix, what type of copy - output file do you mean? Do you mean a single very large file ending in ".raw"? Or just a folder in which the old laptop's hard drive appears with a gazillion native files and folders?...
As a windows user, Knoppix will come easy to you. It boots into a GUI.
What you will be creating is an image (in a single file) of the whole HDD of your laptop.
If the HDD drive is 60 GB, then you will need space on your external HDD of at least 60 GB in order to save this file to it. Put the Knoppix DVD into your drive and reboot, booting from the Knoppix DVD. In the file manager of Knoppix, right click on the external HDD, it should appear as /mnt/hdb1 oder /mnt/sdb1. Activate read and write permissions for this drive. Then open a terminal window and type in the following command:
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dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/hdb1/filename.raw bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror (choose any "filename" you please)
if denotes the source disk, the HDD you want to make an image of. This will always be hda or sda but never hda1 nor sda1 (assuming you only have one HDD installed in your laptop). (hda is an ide HDD, sda is a sata HDD).
of denotes the target. For the target, you will be saving to a partition hence the hdb
1 / sdb
1 respectively. Everything you may want to know about dd and more is located
here for further reference.
If you mix up if and of you will overwrite the data on your laptop drive!After the dd program has finished creating the file, shut down the laptop. Attach the external HDD to the machine where you have CloneVDI installed. In CloneVDI select the raw image file as the source. Allow creation of a new UUID (I think raw format doesn't allow keeping the old UUID, as it doesn't have one), enter the source path and file name for your new VDI. Select the compact option as mpack suggested in a previous post. You will need the same amount of space available to save the VDI as the raw file itself encompasses, i.e. if the image file is 60 GB then you will need 60 GB of free space to save the VDI. The release notes of CloneVDI explain all of this. Thereafter, you need to create a VM and select the newly created VDI as the VM's HDD. Before doing that, read all the infos already posted above and of course
this and
this. It is also advisable to read through
this thread. I don't have a Win 98 VM. I have no idea regarding issues with that OS. But I would assume that DMI BIOS settings would have an impact, so adjust those accordingly before starting the VM for the first time (see links in previous posts).
I am responding to your IM with this entry. As I see, you have created a backup using clonezilla and vbox4me2 has given you instructions on how to use clonezilla to transfer the data to an empty VDI. It should work, as long as the VM is configured correctly. If not, you can always try Knoppix and dd as described above.