Vista - How Difficult is it to Create a VPC Using an Existing OS Installation?

I have an old Win98 installation that I use for testing, and my new
motherboard doesn't appear to support Win98. I would like to create a
VPC using my existing Win98 installation. I use it only occasionally
and to do a very special/limited set of things, and I set this thing
up so long ago I don't remember how to set it up. If it's easy to
incorporate it into a VPC, can someone point me to a procedure for
doing this. If it's tricky to do, I'll just bite the bullet and do a
new install, but I'd rather not have to do that.

jim

On Sat, 25 Oct 2008 10:03:27 -0500, jim evans
<jimsTAKEOUTnews2@xxxxxx> wrote:
If the hardware it is running on now is "old" then you might be lucky
with a p2v conversion.
The procedure is about the same as you would use to move the operating
system to a different physical platform with a new hard disk.

- Use a disk imaging product to create an image of your existing hard
disk. (Acronis or Ghost come too mind as products here). If they have
something called "universal restore" or similar then that is what you
want.

- Then boot up the new virtual machine with the boot disk of the
imaging software and transfer the image onto the empty virtual hard
drive.

- Then restart the virtual machine and cross your fingers.

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

On Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:44:20 +0200, Bo Berglund <boberglund@xxxxxx>
wrote:
Just remembered one p2v I made to make a copy of my mother's PC for
support purposes. She has a Win2000pro PC (old Compaq w. 600 MHz CPU
etc) and I used the built-in backup function in Win2K to take a full
system backup of the disk of that machine.
Then I created a virtual machine and installed a bare bones Win2000pro
in which I used the built-in restore function to make a system restore
from the backup.
I had to restart a couple of times but then the guest had resolved all
the hardware differences and was operational with all of my mother's
software accessible.

So there are many ways to achieve the target.

The thing to watch out for are fancy USB devices that use specialized
drivers. These will not work at all since VPC2007 does not handle USB
at all.
--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)