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

[glnz]

Can I easily dump my old Win98SE laptop into Virtual Box running on my WinXPPro SP3 desktop so that the old laptop will "live forever"?

I have never done any virtual computing, although my wife accuses me of virtual dishwashing. If I install Virtual Box on my home Dell Optiplex 755 running WinXPPro SP3, with 4GB of RAM, would it be possible to "dump" my 10-year old Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300 laptop (Win98SE) into Virtual Box so that the laptop and everything on it live forever and also remain usable (and changeable) inside Virtual Box?

I asked my IT guy whether something like that was possible, he gave me five seconds of silence (meaning stunned by my ignorance and searching for a diplomatic way out) and then said it might be possible if I used a cloning program (Acronis?) to clone the laptop into a virtual ... thingy.

There are no normal Win98SE disks. Toshiba did supply a custom OEM disk for re-installing the Win98SE OS with Toshiba utilities onto the laptop, but I am guessing it is not useful for Virtual Box by itself and, anyway, would have none of the Win98SE updates that came out since the stone age.

FYI, if I do this, I would prefer to park the laptop/Win98SE clone somewhere in my external hard drive, a Western Digital 1 Terabyte "Book" that is connected by USB to the Dell Optiplex 755.

Please start me on this path to knowledge. You may want to give me links to Virtual Box + Win98SE for dummies - that's OK.

Thank you, o wise people!

[Timelord]

I think, make a Ghost image and then use Ghost in the virtual box to restore the image

[glnz]

Timelord - Thanks! Questions:

1) Since I assume my Virtual Box will be running at first with nothing in it at all, will I be able to order it to import and install the ghost clone? Doesn't Virtual Box need an embedded OS in order to import the ghost clone of my laptop (or do anything at all)? Or can I "boot" the Virtual Box off something external that then imports and installs the ghost clone into Virtual Box? Or am I just worrying too damned much and this is not a problem?

2) Since Ghost is not a free program (as far as I know), could I instead use a free cloning program like Acronis (?) or the new EaseUS cloning program? (I suppose it has to be a program that works in my Win98SE laptop first and then will also work on my WinXPPro desktop. It will be my first time ghosting or cloning anything.)

3) May I ask for step-by-step guidance?

4) If all of this works, and Virtual Box thinks it is a Win98SE Toshiba laptop from 11 years ago, will it start asking for a date with Erica Eleniak?

[Timelord]

Strange, yesterday I used it, now I can't find it anymore. Maybe signed as unusably and deleted it.

Search on the net and find a bootable Ghost distribution. Make a Ghost image and put that on the Ghost distribution.
Choose in the VB for that image and start the box. The box will act as a normal pc, so you become the startup of Ghost and you can choose which
image to restore. Choose the one in that distribution.

Try it.

Another image programm is fine, for long as it it bootable.

[glnz]

Timelord: Thanks again.

Please correct me re steps below:

Make sure one of my external drives is compatible with being connected to my Win98SE laptop by USB. If it is already formatted (NTSF ?) for my WinXPro SP3 desktop, then create a partition in it and format that partition for compatibility with Win98SE (FAT 32?). If you don't think this is necessary, please let me know - I would prefer not to try to do this.

Start up my Win98SE laptop, connect it to the web and (by USB) to the external drive.

Find a free Ghost program and download and install it on the Win98SE laptop. Do you have a favorite Ghost app that will be compatible with Win98SE?

I think the next step is to order the Ghost program to create a bootable CD for the Win98SE laptop, correct? (The laptop has only CD, not DVD.)

Restart the the Win98SE laptop off the bootable CD.

Create a Ghost image of the laptop on the external drive. (The TOTAL laptop - everything including the dust.)

Turn off the laptop, and connect that external drive back to my WinXPPro SP3 desktop.

Go to my WinXPPro SP3 desktop and download and install Virtual Box.

Turn on Virtual Box and -- here I am not sure -- point it at the laptop image on the external drive and say "Go"? Please give me details here.

(If the ghost image of my Win98SE laptop is in a FAT 32 partition of my external drive, will Virtual Box running on my WinXPPro SP3 desktop have any trouble finding it and working with it?)

Will it really be that easy?

If it works, I would like the virtual machine image/dream/spirit of my Win98SE laptop to stay on the external drive and not take up space up my desktop hard drive. Any thoughts on that? It might be possible to put a second hard drive in my WinXPPro SP3 desktop, but would that be noticeably better?

Thanks to all for your thoughts and comments!

[Timelord]

When created the image programm on the laptop, you can start the programm and make an image file.
It's not neccesary that you do that from a bootable cd.

Make sure you make an image file, GHO (Like ISO), you don't have to burn it to a cd or dvd.
Put it on your pc, put the imageprogramm to it and make an bootable ISO.
There are many bootable cdloaders on the net.

Start VB and make a W98 box. Choose for the image, look at the picture.
I don't know for sure, but I think, when creating the VBbox, you can already choose for the image fle.

[glnz]

Timelord - Thanks again, including your picture!

You wrote: "When created the image programm on the laptop, you can start the programm and make an image file.
It's not neccesary that you do that from a bootable cd."

But I thought a ghost could only be created when the hard drive to be ghosted is NOT actually running the PC. I thought you had to start the PC off a bootable CD with the ghosting program on it in order to read the hard drive and make the image. Am I wrong about that?

Please recommend a free ghosting app. Can it be set to make the ghost image bootable, or is that a separate step later?

You wrote: "Start VB and make a W98 box." Can I make a W98 box without any disks for W98? Does VB already contain the option of making a W98 box? I thought I maybe could have an empty VB point to my ghost image and find all of W98 in the image. Am I wrong about that? To say this another way, my only source for W98 is the image of my laptop.

Timelord, apologies for all the detail, but this information will be very helpful when I finally start to try to do this. Thanks again.

[Timelord]

It's truly possible to make an image with a programm which is running on your C drive.
The programm makes a snapshot. I think it's possible to do other things, but I always leave the pc alone till it's finished.

In Isobuster or another such programm, you can choose the option "bootable".

steps:

install Norton Ghost or another imageprogramm on your laptop
make an image of your drive and store it as a file on your externe drive
put the contents of the Ghost cd in the same map
Use an ISO programm to make an ISO file
Start VB (Virtual box) and make a new workbox
choose for the ISO file

This way it must work.
Ask if not.

[glnz]

Timelord:

What means "put the contents of the Ghost cd in the same map"?

Also, is there any Free competitor to Norton Ghost?

Thanks.

[Timelord]

The contents of the Ghost cd AND the imagefile, put them in one map and make an ISOfile of that map.

For free see your inbox

[dirks]

The contents of the Ghost cd AND the imagefile, put them in one map and make an ISOfile of that map.

I assume that's the Dutch 'map' meaning folder / directory...

Gr.
Dirk.

[Etepetete]

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.

[Timelord]

I assume that's the Dutch 'map' meaning folder / directory.

Yes

[mpack]

and then converting the raw image using CloneVDI.

If you do that then I would also recommend that you turn on CloneVDI's compaction feature, to eliminate unused space from the disk image.

[glnz]

mpack, timelord and epetepete - You guys are great, and thanks very much for info! But maybe you are casting pearls before bacon (me) because I'm nowhere near savvy enough to follow most of what you're suggesting. What the hell, I haven't even installed VB yet, let alone try to run it.

If you have a moment, please re-read my emails from the top here and let me know where to go for some more BASIC basics. Is there a VB for dummies? This forum is SUPERB, and I know it will be critical to success once I get started, but I still need help getting started.

The Oracle pdf instruction manual starts out at the basic level I need, but then doesn't cover my concerns here.

Here's one thing you could help me with -- please confirm that, somehow, eventually, vb WILL read the "ghost" of my Win98SE laptop and use it as the source for the guest OS Win98SE. In other words, please confirm that I DON'T need to get a separate set of Win98SE OS install disks. (Or, if I'm wrong about that, please advise.) That's all I need to know to ruin the next free weekend getting started.

Thanks!