virtualbox.org

I have old working Win98 machine I would like to virtualize.

Does anyone know of any physical to virtual utility for VirtualBox?

Or at least a Physical to virtual disk for the hard drive?

I thought about creating a linuxvb machine, then find a lowlevel disk copy utility to copy to a virtual drive...but I am not familar enough with Linux to do that...but I will if it is the only way.

Thanks in advance

Read the Forum FAQ and the QuickClick FAQ, its all in there.
For instance clonezilla can do this.

I just did this for a DOS disk and I think it should work for Win98 too.

You want to mount the physical disk (as vmdk) to a Virtual Box and then create a virtual disk in that same box and clone the physical to the virtual.

The VBoxManage command to make the vmdk (running in windows) you want is structured like this:

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename c:\virtualdisks\win98_system.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDriveNN

You need to make the filename match your system and the PhysicalDriveNN is computed this way:

On a Win XP (what I used) or Vista(?) mount the hard drive you want to virtualize as a USB disk or attach it to the IDE controller directly.
Right Click My Computer and select Manage
Choose the Disk Manager
On the right column find the disk you attached. The number from the DiskNN is what you change NN to in the -rawdisk

The virtual disk you create with that command can be mounted in a virtual box as one disk.
You attach the empty virtual disk to the same virtual box and use a cloning program to make the copy (I used Acronis, but I think Clonezilla would work as well).

After that you can boot the virtual disk and good luck from there.

HTH, Bob Roos

note: Clonezilla works pretty well and you really don't have to know anything about Linux. DL the ISO and attach it to a VirtualBox and play with it before running for real. This is getting to be more fun than work!