virtualbox.org

Hi all,
Been suggested to use VB to solve a problem we have, can anyone tell us if this is practical and whether I need to download / install anything else?

We've been using old PC machines to run a legacy app. It will only run on WinXP (SP3) 32 bit and uses a parallel port dongle. Old machines are 10 years old and dying.
Replacing the app is not practical, the developer is no longer in business and it's a specialized engineering app that would have to be re-written from scratch.

Haven't downloaded VB yet, so I'll assume we will be using version 5.0 shown at the download link.

Our host machines are Win7 pro and Ultimate, both 64 bit, 16GB RAM, 2TB SSD in 4 x 512GB partitions, both have 2 x serial and 1 x parallel ports on PCI cards.

Neither machine will allow XP to be installed, either standalone or multi-boot.

Hence the question: will this combination of host and guest work OK, and will the XP guest be able to use the parallel port? Don't care if anything else in Win7 land can't use the printer port, we only had them fitted when we bought the machines as we assumed we could load XP onto one of the partitions.

Thanks in advance to anyone that can enlighten us...

This is the problem with dongled apps. It limits the lifetime of the application - people should IMHO absolutely refuse to accept them, and yet they do. I'm not a huge fan of online activation either, for similar reasons.

Anyway, I'm afraid it is impossible to answer your question: the best you can do is try it. In theory VirtualBox supports the features needed to support this app and this dongle... but using any physical hardware from a VM can be a rather hit and miss affair. If this dongle (or app) is very sensitive to timing when accessing the dongle then it can never work in a VM.

I'm curious why you don't simply install XP on a new PC? Despite hype to the contrary this is still very much possible. You can even use VMs to practice how to do it. XP doesn't support SATA so you would either rely on SATA "IDE emulation" in the PC BIOS, or you would have to install Intel SATA drivers. In practical terms there are no USB3 drivers for XP, but I doubt you care about that.

Another thing you could do is create an XP VM with all of the right drivers for SATA etc, and then transfer the image to a physical host.

hpssb wrote: Neither machine will allow XP to be installed, either standalone or multi-boot.

Details on this? How does it prevent you? Does it have a goon lurking in the shadows to beat you up if you try? I assume you mean that there is some error on installation, perhaps SATA related.

What I would do if I was you, was image the old PC with Acronis, and transfer that image to a new PC.

A useful first exercise would be for you to convert the existing physical PC to a VM, using Disk2VHD. Google for "P2V site:forums.virtualbox.org" for discussion of this. Do not use VMWare converter.

Read the old XP migration wiki for some of the gotchas. Ignore the step by step (you'll be using Disk2VHD), but do carry out the MergeIDE step. You might need to delete "intelppm.sys" and "agp440.sys" too.

Your goal will be to get XP running in a VM (do not activate!). The act of doing so will make your XP image more portable - with SATA drivers too - it can then be transferred to a new physical host with relative ease (now you can activate).

mpack wrote:This is the problem with dongled apps. It limits the lifetime of the application - people should IMHO absolutely refuse to accept them

With these sort of apps / environment, it's the norm - we've had to deal with these things since the DOS 6.2 days.

The dongle doesn't seem too bothered about timing, it's run OK on anything from a Pentium 100 up to a core 2 duo machine, sometimes with a printer and other dongles connected to the port.

I'm curious why you don't simply install XP on a new PC?

It's getting harder to find new kit that will run it. The last few machines we bought don't have all the chipset drivers needed (such as on-board ethernet, sound, etc) and have SATA issues. The last three boxes we tried it on (the two i7's mentioned earlier, and an i3 with only 4G of RAM and a real HDD) all "blue screen" at the installation point where it goes from text to graphic mode in the installation process.

I could find a suitable machine if I looked hard enough and spent enough time hacking it to get XP to install, but that's only going to get harder.
What I'm trying to do instead is find a way to run XP on modern hardware and be able to back it up / change the machine / restore it easily. This will be a lot more future proof.

Your goal will be to get XP running in a VM

I'm assuming the process goes something like this:

1) Install VB, and create a virtual "space" with say 1GB RAM and 100GB or so disk space

2) From Win 7, tell the virtual machine to boot from CD or USB

3) Install XP to it, then the app(s).

(do not activate!)

The XP we have is a leftover from when all the offices etc ran XP (about 100 machines). It never asks for activation, unlike the version of XP I had at home.

The user manual is a good place to start - it has a "create your first VM" section near the start. Your suggested specs sound like overkill for a legacy app. I would have thought that 1GB RAM, 32GB hdd, and 48MB VRAM was plenty. I would suggest creating an ISO image of the install CD first - point at it when prompted by the first run wizard (be carefull - the first run wizard is suppressed if you change any VM settings after VM creation but before first boot).

p.s. booting from USB is not an option for a VBox VM.

Actually, I just realized that isn't right. It's correct if you only want to consider installing XP from scratch into a blank VM - and is probably best if you don't care about preserving a carefully tweaked environment. Otherwise it may be easier to go the P2V route using Disk2VHD instead, as already mentioned. The creation procedure is the same until you get to the disk creation step, at which point you choose "use existing" and point at the VHD. If you choose the latter then try to move the VHD into the VM folder before choosing it - VMs are more reliable if files aren't scattered about.

Thanks for the replies, I'll download and install it now...

The P2V'd XP guest will still need to have the dongle attached to your host PC through the supposedly-still-extant parallel port on the host. Then you have to share the host's parallel port to the guest. Parallel ports are quite the endangered species, as you likely know.

I'd recommend to emulate the dongle. You contact an emulating company to read the function of the dongle and write a program to simulate the presence of the dongle in software. You then can run the program without the dongle attached. Put the simulator in the guest with the program, and you can take your guest anywhere you can run Virtualbox, no dongles required.

We have emulated three of our work software dongles, then we put those dongles in the safe-deposit box at the bank. (Them things cost more by density than gold, you know...) All of the programs needing dongles run happily in my Windows XP and 7 guests, no dongles attached to the host PC. PM me if you want the company we've used. Not expensive at all when we did it a few years ago.

Don't mind having the dongle attached all the time, the PC is in a fairly secure location (unlikely to be stolen / tampered with) and it's not going to see a lot of wear if it's not being moved around. One of the host machines has two ports, the other has one. They are still used for some industrial applications - HP still has them as an option on their business class boxes - but they have been dead for years in consumer grade kit.

I'm looking at a couple of dongle emulation maker places. Dongleservice.com looks promising, verging on too good to be true, but the total absence of pricing information and certain details is a bit of an ominous sign for us. Endlessvisions.com looks a bit more businesslike, but it looks like having to send the dongle overseas to be cloned - I'm a bit uncomfortable doing that, and I'd like to keep things as legal as I can, cloning dongles might be a "grey area".

There may be others, if you can PM us with the name of the company that did yours I'll look into it further. For now, I'll be happy just get it working in an XP VB under Win7.
Installed XP, drivers, and apps OK. Will dry it with the dongle soon...

Dongleservice.com is the one we used. It's been four or five years since we first bought an emulator from them; I think the price for emulating one dongle was $299 or $399, can't remember exactly, and a discount if there's more dongles to do. Just have to email them and ask. We got a limited-time trial to see if the emulation worked before we paid a cent. The dongle stayed in our office, they sent over a program to read it and it generated a dump file we emailed back to them. They then gave us the timed-trial emulator program, we tested it, then we sent the money, and they sent back an unlocked emulator. Everything has worked flawlessly, and we're very happy and would use them again. We bought another emulator from them a couple of years ago for a different program, still had the same good service.

Sounds like a review, doesn't it? No I don't work for them. I think my boss paid by credit card, so you could always reverse the charge if you have a problem. Unless things have majorly gone down the toilet over there since a couple years ago, I don't think you'll have any glitches.

I myself think that emulating a dongle is morally fine, even if it could be fuzzy in the EULAs. You spent money on the program, the program's company is out of business, if something fails or the necessary port becomes unavailable you can't replace the dongle officially, and you still need the program. Emulation while the dongle still works allows the original intent of the whole transaction to still be implemented.