Can I easily dump my old Win98SE laptop into Virtual Box?

[Timelord]

OK, I'm out. Glnz, I think mpack can help you.
And if not ? not my problem any more.

[dlgn]

As another option, you could use the raw hard disk. http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk

[glnz]

To all:

Well, I started last night, first by trying to make an image of my old laptop Win98SE hard drive.

Started by downloading Clonezilla, a daunting program to a non-techy like myself. I made the bootable CD and was able to get Clonezilla running on my laptop in the default and beginner modes, but Clonezilla reported that my laptop hard disk has bad clusters and would not finish. So I stopped, rebooted the laptop into DOS and ran scandisk fixall. Sure enough, I have a few bad clusters.

Clonezilla continues to choke if I run it in its default beginners modes. I tried to run it in expert - rescue mode but it finished after cloning only 5% of my laptop HD.

I then downloaded Seagate's copy of Acronis and made a bootable CD, but it won't run unless I have a Maxtor or other proprietary hardware hooked up, which is not the case.

I have not yet tried EaseUS Home Backup or EaseUS Disk Copy, as I'm not sure they make the kind of image that VB requires. (Do they?)

Any other suggestions? Is there a way to get Clonezilla to continue and to skip over the bad clusters? The technical information in their forum is quite confusing - was a miracle I could find the "rescue" option, but it didn't work as I hoped.

Is there a past version of Ghost that is no longer a pay product?

By the way, when I finally succeed in making an image of my Win98SE laptop hard drive for use in VB, what is the proper file extensions for such image. Is .img good for VB? Clonezilla's final output seems to be a whole bunch of files in a folder, and maybe it will split up my image so that no file exceeds 2GB. My guess is that it would be better to have all 11GB of my laptop HD in a single image file for VB. Thoughts?

Thanks. I realize the questions here are more about cloning than about VB, but they are part of this newbie's effort to use VB and become a PC genius like y'all.

[glnz]

As another option, you could use the raw hard disk. http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk

dlgn - thanks for suggestion. I might try that later, although your link warns of danger and risk. Any thoughts on my latest post at 1:35pm?

[vbox4me2]

When you have made a dump you load the same bootable CD/ISO inside the VM, use a second VDI to fill that one with the dump data via another already working VM (you can swap VDI's between VM's)

Clonezilla does have an option to skip bad sectors, you'd have to go thru the advanced menu's to find it.

[glnz]

Hey - vbox4me2 - Thanks. Your first suggestion is premature for me, as I must first wrestle with bum sectors on my old laptop. Is there a tutorial anywhere that will give me a step-by-step for making Clonezilla skip or repair the bad sectors? I found expert-rescue but it didn't go all the way to the end. What do you think I did wrong?

[vbox4me2]

Take your pick of attack mode:
http://www.google.nl/search?q=clone+har ... vns&tbas=0

[jorgensen]

The easiest way I can think of is using the boot CD of Active@ Boot Disk - though not freeware.
Making the image:
1: Boot with this CD on the Win98 machine.
2: Connect a USB drive or pen.
3: Run the Disk Image program and save the image to the USB unit.
Restore the image:
1: Mount the CD to the Win98 vm at boot with it.
2: Attach the USB unit in the guest.
3: Restore the image with the Image program.

[mpack]

"Raw hard disk" is a way of making VBox use a physical hard disk on the host, so as far as I can tell it's not an appropriate suggestion here. AFAIK you are trying to create a VM which you can run on any host, not continue to be tied to the original laptop (otherwise... you would just continue using that laptop in native mode).

[mpack]

The easiest way I can think of is ...

Which is the same basic procedure I gave about 15 messages back.

There's nothing much IMHO which hasn't already been said. He has to learn how to use his chosen disk imaging tools to make a copy of the hd, and that's about it.

[glnz]

Well - I made the image of the old laptop using Clonezilla. A combination of running MHDD with scan-remap, twice, the second time showing no bad sectors, and then discovering I had failed to put an asterisk in "repair" in Clonezilla. (I'm SO embarrassed!)

See the attached jpeg for a screenshot of the resulting image files in the folder created by Clonezilla on my external drive. Note that none of them says ".img".

When I get back from breakfast with dear old Dad, I'll turn on vb and see if I can figure out how to restore (?) this image into vb.

Your messages above indicate this might be harder than I think. How will I get vb to boot off my Clonezilla CD? Then, how will I make it "restore" from the external drive? Doesn't vb need an operating system or other add-ons first to do this? Will it see my external drive at all?

Thanks, guys, for getting me this far.

[glnz]

Etepetete, you wrote here on 9. Mar 2011, 06:58

I would suggest booting from a Linux live CD such as Knoppix and using the dd program to make a raw image of the Laptop's hard drive to an external HDD and then converting the raw image using CloneVDI. Beware, the dd program is very powerful and the syntax has to be followed correctly otherwise you will wipe your laptop's hard drive completely. Also take note of the information in this tutorial concerning DMI BIOS settings. Here is also a tutorial with valuable information.

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?

Could you also suggest some basic settings in Knoppix and CloneVDI? I am not a techy, and I also have never used anything Linux before. Thanks.

[vbox4me2]

Your messages above indicate this might be harder than I think. How will I get vb to boot off my Clonezilla CD? Then, how will I make it "restore" from the external drive? Doesn't vb need an operating system or other add-ons first to do this? Will it see my external drive at all?

Thanks, guys, for getting me this far.

Good, you have learned something now on to the next part.

Download gparted live-CD(ISO).

Create a new VM with 2 VDI's(harddisk) dynamic of about 10gb, bridge mode network adapter, attach your gparted ISO to it's Cdrom, then boot from CD. With gparted running format both disks with fat32, then find the samba part in the menu's and attempt to 'map a drive' to your Host machine(a windows file share) and place the clonezilla files from that share to the second disk.

Shutdown the VM, swap the CD for the clonezilla ISO and boot from CD, clonezilla should see 2 drives now, locate the w98 dump files on the second drive and restore it as a drive to drive 1.

You should then be able to boot of drive 1 and you can trow drive 2 away, though do read the VBox manual about immutable mode, this will allow you to findle with w98 to get it running without nuking the main drive by incorrect changes, ea. write it all down what you did, then re-register the VDI as normal and repeat all your fixes to make them permanent.

[Etepetete]

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:

Code: Select all   Expand viewCollapse view

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 hdb1 / sdb1 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.

[mpack]

Just to avoid any confusion with might follow: as requested, Etepetete has expanded on his original suggestion, and many of the links he provides are indeed useful.

However... the OP has said that he has already finished imaging his drive with ClonzeZilla, hence the procedure for doing this with Knoppix and dd and CloneVDI is now moot, and should be seen as an alternative suggestion for future readers - the OP is already on a different path.

VBox4Me2's answer is on the right track I think. There's also this thread where I discuss several ways of getting access to a humungous drive image from inside a guest. That discussion has lots of mention of Acronis and booting from a BartPE CD, but the techniques just as easily apply to any other drive imaging software and its equivalent CD boot feature (e.g. CloneZilla live CD ISO).