Windows 2000 Transplant

Haze Head

New Member
Any suggestions on moving the OS from an old Dell onto a new machine? I have some ancient software I need to run and the old beast is gonna give up the ghost any day now. A clone would be ideal and if I can load it onto a VM, even better. It's a Win. 2000 system.
 

beers

Moderator
Staff member
No, reinstall. Even Windows 7 was a lil high on the poop factor for transplanting into other systems. XP pretty much shat the bed when moving systems which was built upon a lot of the win2k tech.

You might have better success imaging the drive and rolling it into a virtual machine, so that any hypervisor like VMware workstation could leverage it.
 

Haze Head

New Member
No, reinstall. Even Windows 7 was a lil high on the poop factor for transplanting into other systems. XP pretty much shat the bed when moving systems which was built upon a lot of the win2k tech.

You might have better success imaging the drive and rolling it into a virtual machine, so that any hypervisor like VMware workstation could leverage it.
Lol, good to know. And it's not all surprising I suppose.

Yes, Imaging and moving to VM is what I'd prefer to do. I don't want to disturb the current machine ( I suppose transplant was a poor choice of words). I basically need to clone it and I don't want to inadvertently kill the original in the process. Normally I would just jump into this sort of thing, but because I cannot eff this up I'm looking for a very thorough step by step.
 

beers

Moderator
Staff member
Depends on which hypervisor you want to use, most of them are just running a utility that clones the disk and then you'd be mounting it in vmware as a vdisk.

 

Haze Head

New Member
The part I'm worried about is bricking the Dell during the cloning. I've not been able to connect to ethernet/internet with it and so USB is my only practical entry to the machine. Or disc, lol. To be fair, it's probably CD rather than floppy.

I see that Acronis True Image has a bootable cloning technique, so that would be perfect. They have also stated that it should work on 2000, in theory, due to basic file system requirements. Once I can get something separated from the Dell there's a chance I can 'spin it up' in virtual box.\

Do you have any thoughts on the clone procedure?
 

beers

Moderator
Staff member
Do you have any thoughts on the clone procedure?
Not really, find whatever tool you prefer. Personally I would just do it manually in linux because you can DD the volume to get a 1:1 clone and use qemu to convert to vmdk or whatever other container format you want

qemu-img convert -O vmdk imagefile.dd vmdkname.vmdk`
 

Haze Head

New Member
Wait, wuuut? That sounds cool but it flew right over my head. I'm Linux deficient. I can slowly crawl and usually get by with it though. I do have Ubuntu and Kali on VMs.

So, Dell with only USB access. PC with with all the hot shit, linux VMs, windows10 etc. What do I do first? I'm not clear on how to physically extract the drive. Do you mean to use a Linux thumb drive, boot into that, and run a utility? If that's the case, I'll look into it. Can you point me further in that direction?
 
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