Question about Virtual Machine systems

[Technomage-hawke]

On Sunday 13 January 2008 12:21, Joseph Sinclair wrote:
> All,
>   Knowing that some of you are far more experienced with running things in
> a VM than I am, I would like to know if any of you have ideas for the
> following scenario:
>
>   I have a family member who is running Windows XP and the box it's on is
> dying fast.  Rather than buy a new Windows box and attempt to, maybe,
> migrate everything, my thought is to take a full disk backup of the Windows
> machine and load that into a Virtual Machine on one of my Linux systems. 

ok, I can answer pretty much all of your questions here.
to begin with, unless you have a version of windows prior to XP SP1, you are 
going to run into an authentication problem within windows due to changed 
primary hardware (in this case the CPU and apparent motherboard). that will 
require calling MSFT to get it fixed :(

now, the other answer, yes and no. yes, you can transplant the drive into the 
new machine and startup vmware using the drive as "native hardware". windows 
will bitch a bit, but then it will allow installation of new hardware (the 
new hardware found wizard). HOWEVER, some devices will not be present and 
some drivers may get confused as a result. YMMV

the best case would be to install windows as a new vmware session, the copy 
some of the relevant data from the old drive onto the new system. this avoids 
the hardware issues of trying to transplant an already installed drive. you 
may still be required to re-auth with MSFT though (depending on OS version).


in any case, using vmware is, for the most part, rather more useful than not. 
at least you will be able to recover your data from the HD.