Possible to virtualize a Windows 95 existing environment?

[gbkd80]

Does anyone know if it's possible to virtualize an existing Windows 95 system?

I'm new to VB so I don't know yet how it all works, but I have an HVAC client that uses a very, very old laptop running Windows 95 and a couple of special applications they use to program older HVAC systems. It does not have a network card or USB. I had thought about taking out the drive and cloning it using Acronis universal restore but then the problem that it would pose is that the original drive is 810MB, and I don't know how that would work when it hit a larger drive. Possibly I could partition it first to maybe 1GB, and do it that way?

But my client is concerned that the laptop is going to stop working and they obviously don't have any of the software programs they use on it in any other capacity other than on the laptop. We've opened the unit up once already to replace a floppy drive, which, the replacement didn't even work and that was one time the unit was torn apart... I get concerned how many times a system like that can be ripped open without damaging something eventually. So we had a discussion and I thought of the possibility of a P2V with it, so that it could run in a VM on another Windows host.

How would I go about doing this if it were even possible?

[scottgus1]

There's a tool Microsoft put out to P2V XP & such, Disk2VHD. It of course didn't exist when 95 was in vogue. You will probably have to remove the drive from the laptop and connect it to a more modern system to run Disk2VHD on it.

Question that may be pertinent: How does the laptop program the devices? through serial? Parallel? Serial has been implemented in Virtualbox. If parallel, see: viewtopic.php?f=35&t=54187. You will have to have the same type of connection on the more modern hardware. Might the software vendor have a more up-to-date program?

Best as I know, when an imaging program restores a small image to a larger drive, the end of the drive is left unused and could be turned into another partition.

This may help: viewtopic.php?t=9918
A google or three on: "p2v windows 95 Virtualbox" and variants thereof would also provide good advice.

[gbkd80]

Awesome, thanks. I wasn't sure if I would be able to use Disk2VHD for this... not that experienced with any of this but I have other colleagues who do this all the time with servers; the big concern was being that it's 95.

Yes, it programs the devices through serial. I figured having serial ported in any of these VM environments was already a given which was why I didn't bother mentioning it.

[scottgus1]

There's a program you would run on an XP PC to prepare it for P2Ving, called MergeIDE. Makes Windows a little more flexible when suddenly booting on different hardware. See Migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox The advice is a little old regarding the method to make the virtual disk, Disk2VHD is better. But if you can make a backup of the laptop disk, then run MergeIDE on the laptop, it might help the process.

Also, if you are successful in getting a VHD file, turn it into a .vdi for use in Virtualbox. VHD format has an inherent design flaw that makes the format more delicate if the host fails while writing to the VHD file. VDI is native to Virtualbox and does not have that design flaw. Use Mpack's CloneVDI to do the convert.

[mpack]

A couple of notes on the above.

I'm not sure that Disk2VHD will work. It's designed principally for imaging NTFS drives in conjuction with the volume snapshot feature. Win95 uses FAT32 and the VSS feature doesn't exist. Still, there's no harm in trying.

MergeIDE is appropriate for XP P2Vs, but Win95's architecture will be quite different.

Have you considered simply copying the executable folders to a newly created XP VM? Applications of that era could often be moved in that way. Win95 native apps were Win32 based, same as XP.

[andyp73]

Copy an app from Windows 95 to XP might not work depending on how the application accesses the serial port. In a Windows 95 application it was perfectly possible to read and write IO port 0x3F8 and friends which XP won't allow.

As it is on a FAT32 partition something like Ghost would be able to make an image file which could be restored into the VM - you would need to create a bootable ISO with Ghost and the image file for the restore (maybe).

Andy.

[gbkd80]

Have you considered simply copying the executable folders to a newly created XP VM? Applications of that era could often be moved in that way. Win95 native apps were Win32 based, same as XP.

I haven't... honestly, I just started working on the unit and have not even opened up the apps in question. Might not hurt to try that though...

And I did happen to mention the Disk2VHD scenario to a co-worker of mine and he said the exact same thing as posted, that because VSS did not exist until XP it wouldn't work.

[michaln]

What laptop model is it exactly? Hard disks are (were) typically relatively easy to remove.

Anyway, I assume it's a 2.5" IDE disk. Get a USB to IDE adapter which allows you to directly attach such disks to a modern system (adapters like that exist, I have one). Take the drive out of the laptop, plug it into the adapter, hook that up to a *nix system, run 'dd' to image the entire disk (well, Windows can do that too, it's just more hassle). Make a backup, then you can start playing with it.

It is possible to convert the disk image to VDI/VMDK/etc. or add a flat VMDK descriptor and use it directly. Watch out for geometry! Windows 95 will not be happy booting in a different environment but it might just survive long enough to fix the settings.

[mpack]

Copy an app from Windows 95 to XP might not work depending on how the application accesses the serial port. In a Windows 95 application it was perfectly possible to read and write IO port 0x3F8 and friends which XP won't allow.

Windows 95 was a protected mode operating system too, with protected mode drivers, albeit that the driver architecture wasn't as mature as it became in Win98SE (i.e. Win95 used VXDs, which had a really weird creation method, Win98's driver model moved closer to NT/WDM).

In summary: I think you're wrong - direct access to the serial port might have appeared to work, but in fact a background VMM function would intercept the call and redirect it to the device driver. In the end, everything is using the device driver - there's no other way to multitask DOS apps.