How can i import an existing hard drive and operating system

[CarpCharacin]

So if i have the data from the hard drive from a dead windows 98 laptop, can i import everything to a virtual machine? I want to have it so the virtual machine has the laptop's operating system, programs it had, photos and documents. I want it to essentially be the laptop but on a virtual machine. Can i do this if i have everything from the C drive?
EDIT: is it possible to convert a .zip of c files to a virtual hard drive?

[dlharper]

You can certainly bring the data to a virtual machine, but probably not the OS directly. (You can in theory simply convert the old drive to a virtual one (see, for instance, https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows). However, it is unlikely to boot up. There will be a lot of differences between the laptop and the virtual machine, and Windows will probably fail.)

Your best option is probably to set up a Windows 98 VM from scratch (see viewtopic.php?f=28&t=59559). Install any software you want to use, then copy the data. The simplest way to copy is probably to put what you want on a CD image.

[mpack]

Moved to "Windows Guests".

Win98SE is hard to P2V, mainly because it will go nuts when it sees all that new hardware that it doesn't have drivers for. If it works then it'll need access to the original setup disk to get new drivers. Hopefully your Win98 was installed from a setup folder on your hard disk - otherwise you will need the original setup CD.