virtualbox.org

I have a couple of old Virtual PC drives with Windows 98 and PC DOS 2000 and some programs and stuff that I would like to use in virtualbox. I found out that Microsoft bought Connectix Virtual PC and that Connectix invented the .vhd format that Microsoft has since used. I assumed that my old Virtual PC drives would be in this format, even if the files themselves does not contain a suffix. I tried adding .vhd to the files and using them as virtual drives in VirtualBox. But the result I get is an error message stating that VirtualBox is unsuccesfull at opening the drives. Maybe the .vhd format was not used in version 4 and/or 5 of the Connectix Macintosh Virtual PC? Maybe I could just add some sort of header and footer or change something in the virtual drive file? Any ideas?

There is a Virtual Disk Assistant in Virtual PC for changing format of the disk images to/from "expandable" and "fixed size" formats. Does VirtualBox require a "fixed size" format or is the drive image format completely incompatible anyway? Or is the Virtual PC drive format on the old Connectix Mac versions some other sort of disk image that I might manipulate with Disk Copy in OS 9 or Disk Tools in OS X to change into a format readable by VirtualBox?

If it is just a matter of copying the data over, maybe I could run Windows 98 in Virtual PC on my iBook, connect it to Ubuntu in VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro with ethernet and copy another copy of my Windows 98 virtual disk (it will probably not let me copy the startup disk) over to a fresh .vdi disk image that is mounted in Ubuntu, and then repeat this with the PC-DOS disk? If there is no easier way by just manipulating the disk images, I'll give it a try.

One possibility is that your hard disks are "raw", i.e. logical size exactly equal to physical size, straight flat files with no fancy internal structures at all. If the sizes fit exactly then the disks are certainly raw and you can use "VBoxManage convertfromraw" to convert them to VDI. Better yet you can use CloneVDI with the "Compact" switch enabled, as that will give you a VDI with a more manageable size. Do not try this if the sizes do not fit the hypothesis, as the results will be garbage.

CloneVDI is a Windows app, so to run it you'll either need to borrow a Windows PC (with the raw files on a USB hard disk) or run CloneVDI under Wine/WineBottler. Ps. CloneVDI requires raw files to have a ".raw" extension.

Failing that, the only way I can think of to solve the problem is to boot your iBook VMs from a Linux live CD, and use CloneZilla to image the virtual C drive, writing the raw image to a shared folder, or to an external USB drive if VirtualPC supports the latter. You would then convert the raw image as above.

Thanks for the tips! I tried the XBoxMange convertfromraw on copies of the drive images and it seemed to work ok in the terminal, but when creating VMs with these images in VirtualBox, they both failed to start and gave me an error "Fatal! No bootable medium found." I couldn't check the size of the disk before doing this since my iBook is presently at my cabin, but I thought it was worth a shot. No harm in working on copies. Small disks anyway.

I'll try your CloneZilla idea as soon as I get to my iBook and good old OS 9. (Actually I tried running Virtual PC 4 in Mac OS 8.6 in Sheepshaver on the MacBook Pro as well, but it didn't let me, so I need my iBook.)