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

Posted: 13. Mar 2011, 16:14
by glnz
My God, this is COMPLICATED! It makes me want to just print everything off my old laptop and throw it out the window. Mpack, timelord, Etepetete and vbox4me2 and others here - many thanks for taking the time to write and proof your nicely detailed discussions. But if I hide myself away for the week this would take, I'll be fired (or maybe worse not even noticed), and my wife will pour ice cold pasta and tomato sauce down my back.

We'll see, You all have left so much info that I'm tempted to lose sleep again. So maybe today I shall try the simple with Clonezilla just to use vb for the first time even if I know it won't work.

Anyway, as you can all see from my screenshot above, Clonezilla creates a folder, not a single file. Do the other clone programs create one file or a folder with many files?

I wish I could follow timelord's early prompt about including the [Ghost / Clonezilla?] CD files with the laptop image files in an ISO. All the files at the same level, or the Clonezilla image folder one level down? And the trialware versions of Ghost I downloaded yesterday don't seem to have a function for making a Ghost CD.

Please feel free to add more detail here. Please do - it's going to help! I'm watching, and maybe this will help a few others not as knowledgeable as you all but more technically adept than I and with more pressing needs.

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

Posted: 13. Mar 2011, 17:59
by mpack
glnz wrote:Anyway, as you can all see from my screenshot above, Clonezilla creates a folder, not a single file. Do the other clone programs create one file or a folder with many files?
Acronis (which I'm familiar with) creates one compressed image file, at least when writing to the NTFS formatted external drive which I use. I don't use CloneZilla, but a lot of programs that produce very large files have an option to split that file into smaller chunks to be less than 4GB (i.e. less than the maximum size allowed on the FAT32 filesystem used by default on many external drives). In that case it wouldn't surprise me if a containing folder was created as well.

ps. This is the easy part - all you are doing so far is copying some data from A to B, so it isn't exactly rocket science. The only thing that makes it special is that the resulting file is so big and cumbersome, which means that decent apps have features like split files, compression etc. The complicated bit comes after you have "restored" the image inside a VM, and try to get it to boot. If you're lucky it will boot right away, 2nd best is that it needs drivers, but you had the foresight years ago to copy the entire setup CD contents into an hdd folder. Otherwise you likely will need a Win98SE Setup CD.

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

Posted: 13. Mar 2011, 19:35
by vbox4me2
glnz wrote:and my wife will pour ice cold pasta and tomato sauce down my back.
My wife does that everyday :mrgreen:
But you could consider buying a backup program such as ghost that lets you make a bootable CD/DVD where everything would be written to, you'd create a VM with 1 vdi and mount that resque cd/dvd and restore inside the VM, done.
ea.: http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&sourc ... =&aql=&oq=

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

Posted: 13. Mar 2011, 19:57
by glnz
Well, guys, I just tried Oracle VB for the first time. I like the look, but as expected my initial hopes were dashed. Here's the report (as expected):

VB does indeed boot off an iso of Clonezilla. But when I try to "restore" my image of my Win98SE laptop (previously made by Clonezilla and sitting on my external drive), I cannot get to it, and I get these two error messages from Clonezilla in the VB:
Error! No unmounted partition(s) are found! To use Clonezilla to save or clone a partition, the source partition must be unmounted! Press "Enter" to exit...

No disk image is found in /home/partimag.. Make sure you already saved an image! Or make sure you did not try to restore an image saved from partition(s) to disk(s)! Program terminated!!!
Now, before I get these error messages, Clonezilla prompts me for come choices. I always pick the first of the following five, mostly because I have not been able to get the following four to work at all, but ...
Use local device (e.g.: hard drive, usb drive) [<- this is what I pick]
Use SSH server
Use SAMBA server (Network Neighborhood server)
Use NFS Server
enter_shell Enter command line prompt (do it manually)
skip Use existing /home/partimag (Memory! NOT RECOMMENDED)
I don't know Linux at all, so the "enter_shell" is useless to me, because I don't know how to make it point to my external drive or drill down to the folder that is the clone image of my laptop HD. But do you think one of the above other four choices might help?

Also, per timelord's very first suggestion on page 1 of this thread, I made an ISO that is a combination of Clonezilla CD and the image of my laptop, but it does not boot in VB -- Clonezilla does not even start. (Could that be because I don't have the right boot image file in the ISO? When making the ISO, twice, in ImgBurn, I designated freedos.img the first time, and initrd.img the second time, off the Clonezilla CD as the boot file, but as noted the resulting ISO's did not boot in VB.) Any suggestions? Timelord, how exactly did you make your combination ISO?

One more idea: When I am running VB and Clonezilla has booted, if I go to the top menu and look in "Devices", I see a line for CD/DVD devices, and that, in turn, shows a few different things:
Choose a Virtual CD/DVD disk file ...
Host Drive 'D:'
Host Drive 'F:'
Clonezilla-Live-....iso [<- The pure Clonezilla ISO]
2011ClonezillaandToshibaB.iso [<- The combo Clonezilla + laptop image ISO that does not boot]
Here's what's interesting: Although 'D:' is the CD-DVD player of my Host WinXPPro desktop, 'F:' is a virtual CD that sits on my external drive and holds some promo apps. (The actual Western Digital 1 terabyte external drive is G:, which does not show.) My question: If VB can point to a pre-made virtual CD that is a partition (?) on my Western Digital 1 terabyte external drive, could I somehow put my laptop image into another virtual CD and get it recognized by VB, so that somehow (I don't know how), my Clonezilla selection above ("Use local device (e.g.: hard drive, usb drive)") would find it?

Hey, just asking.

(On the other had, I have already made a partition on the HD of my host WinXPPro desktop, labeled it 'N:', and put a copy of the laptop image there, but 'N:' does not show in VB.)

Well, all the above was expected, and happens to be the same as my experience with Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. (Sorry, guys, didn't want to tell you I was also fooling around with the competition. But, really, you're much prettier than she is.)

You guys have had some difficult but ultimately successful efforts to "restore" a Win98SE HD into VB - I just wish your steps were a lot fewer, as they require LOTS of hands-on experience first.

Thanks again for your thoughts. (Timelord - please rejoin us. If there's a way to make your combo ISO work, I'll send you a Scotch - promise.)

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

Posted: 13. Mar 2011, 20:01
by glnz
vbox4me2 - Just saw your post.
vbox4me2 wrote: ... But you could consider buying a backup program such as ghost that lets you make a bootable CD/DVD where everything would be written to, you'd create a VM with 1 vdi and mount that resque cd/dvd and restore inside the VM, done.
ea.: http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&sourc ... =&aql=&oq=
My Win98SE laptop HD has 8 - 9 GB of files. Don't think Ghost + that image would fit on a DVD. Or are you suggesting making an ISO on the external drive with everything in it?

Which old (cheap) version of Ghost might do that? Please keep in mind that it has to work in (?), read and make a clone of a Win98SE HD.

Thanks.

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

Posted: 13. Mar 2011, 22:12
by FrodoHobbits
When I used Clonezilla to image my old XP laptop, I saved the image to a portable usb drive. The restore/create my VM went really well using this method.

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

Posted: 13. Mar 2011, 22:22
by glnz
But Frodo, that's exactly what I've been trying to do! The Clonezilla image of my Win98SE HD is on my USB external hard drive. Please read this from start. Problem is that when I boot VB using Clonezilla, I get the error messages above - VB doesn't find the external drive and (I suppose) that means Clonezilla running in the VB VM also cannot find it.

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

Posted: 13. Mar 2011, 22:33
by glnz
hey, everyone - Let's take a closer look at the SECOND Clonezilla error message above. It says

"No disk image is found in /home/partimag.. "

Does that mean that the existing Clonezilla image of my Win98SE HD is simply in the wrong place? Where is " /home/partimag.. " when I'm in VB and I've booted up Clonezilla from an ISO on my external G: drive?

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

Posted: 13. Mar 2011, 22:41
by stefan.becker
This is not the right place to discuss this. This is a VBOX forum and not a Clonezilla User forum.

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

Posted: 13. Mar 2011, 23:09
by glnz
Mr. Becker - Noted. However, maybe the question also relates to other "restores". If any cloning or backup program expects the image to be in a particular place, where is that place when you're working in a VM? Maybe there's a way to put a copy of the image in that mysterious place?

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

Posted: 14. Mar 2011, 00:14
by vbox4me2
Your problem is that the external drive is not seen inside the VM so clonezilla isn't finding anything, usb drives can be used inside a VM by creating an empty filter for it via the VBox GUI, see the usb section for the VM, once attached the VM should be able to access it. If its an ISO file where the image is on you can attach it to the VM as a second disk.

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

Posted: 14. Mar 2011, 00:55
by glnz
vbox4me2 - Thanks for the tip. I just played with the filters to add both my external hard drives (connected via USB). VM certainly pulled the ownership information from them for the filters, but there is no change to the error messages. Also added the relevant folders, playing with Auto-Mount on and off. Even moved the Clonezilla image folder into a new folder hierarchy G:/home/partimag/. Same error message, and I'm probably screwing everything up. Still going to be the major work outlined by everyone above.

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

Posted: 14. Mar 2011, 09:21
by Etepetete
Try moving your clonezilla backup to the root of your external HDD, i.e. the folder containing the backups should be at the root as in G:/backupfolder

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

Posted: 14. Mar 2011, 09:50
by FrodoHobbits
I know it's a stupid question but are you following Clonzilla's instructions correctly?
Don't plug in the USB drive until prompted to and once plugged in go to the Devices menu and select this USB drive and then wait, Clonzilla should pick it up and you'll get about a screen full of info - Then hit any key to continue. Waiting is the key I'm sure.
Hope I don't get into trouble from Stefan for trying to help you out with a Clonzilla issue :|

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

Posted: 14. Mar 2011, 13:25
by glnz
Frodo - not stupid. I'll try what you say later this week. Thanks.