If you’re like me, you have at least 40 computers lying around, some of which have software installed that’s useful just often enough to justify their continued existence — inevitably, right after you decide the hardware would be useful for another purpose and wipe out the disk.
In this day and age of virtual computing, it seems like it should be trivial to make a drive image, drop it on a network drive, and then mount that as a virtual image. I don’t know of any drive imaging software that’s directly compatible with virtual machines, or vice versa, so there’s a conversion step involved, where the image from the drive imaging software becomes a drive image for the virtual machine.
Conversion is probably the wrong word to use here, since the process seems to involve running the drive image on the virtual machine software to recover the image. For virtual machines, I used VMWare, and for the drive image software, I used Ghost.
Getting Ghost to save its images to a network share is a matter of selecting the right options when creating its boot disk, most notably the network driver, that has to match the hardware of the machine you’re making the image of. Note that there appears to be a 2 gigabyte limit for files (probably because Ghost is essentially running from DOS) so that Ghost will need to create “spanning” files, or a whole bunch of 2 gigabyte files, that will comprise the image.
If all goes well here, create another boot disk for Ghost to restore the image. This time, you’ll want to get the right network drivers for VMWare, which emulates “AMD PCNet II” hardware. You can get the right drivers here.
Booting a virtual machine from there, I noticed that Ghost.exe wasn’t actually on the boot disk (makes sense, since it’s over 1 megabyte by itself) so I copied it to the network drive made accessible to the boot disk. Before running it, I noticed that I had to manually run “mouse” (the mouse driver) to be able to use my mouse for its DOS-based GUI.
Following the menus to select an image, I got to the point where a dialog box came up to select the image, filling in the A: drive as the default location, and the machine locked up. I don’t mean just the virtual machine either, but the host machine itself. Trying various combinations of A: drive access, removal, and virtualization was no help, Ghost would consistently lock up at this point.
The problem appears to be the dialog itself, and perhaps whatever it’s doing to the floppy drive. Selecting the file from the command line did the trick:
ghost.exe -clone,mode=restore,src=first_1.gho,dst=1
Note that this takes a long time. It took about 12 hours to recover an 80 gigabyte hard drive into a virtual machine. Your mileage may vary.
After all this, once the virtual machine comes up, the almost inevitable result for an XP system will be a blue screen of death — easily remedied by booting the virtual machine from the XP installation CD, and running the recovery process (by pretending to install up until the point where it detects a prior installation of XP, then pressing R.)