Turning a Windows 98 box into a VM

[armb]

Nana Pam has a new computer. Well, a newer computer, from http://www.computerresale.co.uk/refurbished.htm (not one of the ones currently listed). It has XP Pro on it.

My task is to copy everything useful off her current, Windows 98, machine.

That probably means copying "My Documents" (happening as I write), and making sure she has a copy of Word (the 98 machine has an OEM copy of Word 2000, and if it ever had an install CD, I have no idea where it is)

Options for the new machine are:

• install the copy of Word 99 (as part of Works) that came with an even older now dead machine


• give the copy of OpenOffice the new machine came with a Word icon, and hope that by the time she spots that it isn't actually just a different version of Word she'll accept that it is possible to use an alternative


• uninstall Office 2003 Student and Teacher from one of the three machines it's on legally at the moment and install it on hers

But it might be quite nice to turn the whole machine into a VM, for playing old games that don't work even in compatibility mode, and in case anything else that was on it is ever useful.

And we don't have a 98 install CD - I have an Me disk, but upgrade only.

VMware converter doesn't work on 98.

Googling, some options that might work seem to be:

• Put the physical disk into the XP Pro machine, download Virtual PC, convert it to a virtual disk, and see if that's enough to create a Virtual PC VM that uses that disk. (If it is, VMware convertor can convert Virtual PC machines to VMware ones


• Go though this
  

Any other suggestions or hints?

(Oh, and the new machine is a Small Form Factor box, so putting the old physical disk in isn't really an option except as a temporary measure with the box open. But putting it in this machine, or the one downstairs, is a possibility.)

Comments

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

A radical suggestion that I'm threatening Anne's practice's Web machine with.
Install Ubuntu as the core OS.
Install various OSs as VMWare images that get replaced with clean backups before restart. Make one of them get started on boot in full screen mode.

Make My Documents a Samba share on the underlying Ubuntu box that all VMs can see, and virus scan it with something suitable via cron regularly

[armb.livejournal.com]

I've considered changing some of the family machines from dual boot to doing that, but I'm not sure VMware Tools's graphics performance is up to gaming. On the one hand, we're not playing fast twitch games, on the other hand we have relatively slow graphics cards or builtin graphics already, without an extra layer.

[timill]

Put the old disk in an external USB box.

[armb.livejournal.com]

I was going to copy the whole disk onto a LAN disk in case something on it was wanted later, but I'll try and check if the BIOS will boot from a USB drive - if so, that might be useful.