Rhymes With Geek

Hi all i was wondering how i can transfer my existing 98 operating system, to vertual PC on my new hard drive, I am using Win XP on the new drive and i would like to be able to use my 98 system without losing any of my data.

Cheers
Tagg

[thread moved to Virtual PC section]

You need to move it the same way you'd transfer any other operating system, using a tool such as ghost to make an image of the current OS, restore the OS to the new (virtual) hard drive (that you've created inside virtual PC), and then let the OS boot and install the changed hardware.

Thanks Mate for the help, just wasn't sure if i could do it like that using ghost.

Cheers
Tagg

well thats not working to well, i made a ghost image of my old system and stored it on the new drive, made a new virtual drive booted up with ghost but i can not see out of the virtual drive to load my ghost image ???? What am I doing wrong.

Cheers
Tagg

You'd want to put the image onto a CD (a "virtual" CD .iso image made with something like alcohol 120% would be ideal) so that you could then mount this CD on the virtual computer.

hmm yes that would be nice but how do you create a 20gb ISO,??

Tagg

What kind of ghost image do you have? It should compress down to much smaller than that - unless the disk was 80gb full to start with !

Always wanted to try using Ghost to to this myself.

Couldn't we just create a Ghost image on a 'regular' drive and then use the folder sharing feature of VPC to 'grab' the Ghost image? We could then restore it to a virtual drive we created?

we could and thats a good idea - it does mean having a working guest to use shared folders from, to copy the image onto a virtual hard disk, but when we're making 20Gb ghost images then whats one extra guest OS more or less.

Since I haven't done something like this yet I imagine that trying to boot up a production OS environment, with hardware that does not exist on the Virtual Guest, will cause many unexpected problems. Might not even be able to boot at all.

At the least I suspect many things won't work as expected.

One day I'm gonna try this myself.

Oh it'll give errors - may need a "repair" install, or just to be left alone for a very long time with a driver disk for the new hardware - which is what happened the last time I did a transfer of Windows 98 from a Celeron 333mhz (remember those?) based system to a AMD Athlon based system.

Well so far so good,I created a 20gb ghost image created an iso file from that using UltraIso and mounted it using Alcohol 120%.
Booted up the Virtual drive with Ghost but ghost would not reconise the ISO, so what i did was create another virtual Hard drive and using the virtual cd-rom extracted the ghost files to the second drive, then ran the Ghost program again and install the 98 image on to the first drive,so far all is working few little hicups at the moment but i think they can be sorted.

Cheers
Tagg

Sounds like a lot of bother but it seems like its been worth it for you. Great stuff!

Rob

no bother just stress lol, as i upgraded to two 200 gb harddrives and to windows XP,i did not want to lose any of my programs or data in win98 and did not want to go though the hassles of having a dual-boot system. so this has what i needed for the time being.

Thanks for the help guys
Tagg

Gonna mark this post as sticky as its a good example of how to get the job done.