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spam · Feb 10, 2003, 05:58 PM

I have a Rev. A TiBook, that I used to run Virtual PC on. I used it instead of the Windows laptop my company provided. But they "upgraded" to Windows 2000, which was just too much for my TiBook. I went back to using the Windows laptop.

Now I'm thinking of upgrading to a new 1ghz TiBook, and considering going back to Virtual PC. If my old 450mhz machine was fast enough in Windows 98, surely a new machine that's twice as fast will make up for the extra Windows 2000 load.

My biggest problem is that I haven't kept my old Virtual PC disk images current, so now there's a lot of stuff on my Windows laptop that's not on my Mac, and I'm dreading having to go install all that stuff.

Asuming I'm willing to risk the wrath of Microsoft by doing it, is there some way to make an image of the internal hard drive in my Windows laptop to use as the Virtual PC disk image, so that I could move to Virtual PC without loosing anything?

There are hard drive upgrade solutions for the laptop that would allow me to clone my Windows drive to a new, larger hard drive. Could I maybe use one of those to dupe the drive to an external, put that into an external firewire case, and then connect it to my Mac? Would Ghost do what I need? Does Connectix have any kind of utility that would help? Any suggestions?

Art Vandelay · Feb 10, 2003, 07:22 PM

I highly doubt that is possible for two reasons. The first reason is that it probably will not be possible to clone the PC to a VPC disk image. How do you get a PC cloning utility to interface with a VPC disk image running on a Mac? Second, the Windows system on the PC is installed for that particular hardware set. It will not be compatible with the emulated hardware set of VPC. You can only clone from one PC to another PC if they are almost identical in the their hardware configurations.

Chun Hsu · Feb 11, 2003, 01:21 AM

First, I don't have Virtual PC, but am interested in buying it...

As far copying the Windows PC data to Virtual PC, you could share the Windows notebook with the Virtual PC. Then use Virtual PC to just copy the raw files over. Slow as heck, but run it overnight.

Then, is there any way you can overwrite your existing Virtual PC directories with the stuff you copied over? Finally, reinstall Windows on top of that.

I guess what I am saying is that in the past, I have had some success copying raw Windows files and reinstalling over it to pickup my old applications and registry entries. This was in Windows, but perhaps you can make it work with Virtual PC as well.

clebin · Feb 11, 2003, 07:16 AM

I agree - I wondered about using a Ghost image myself. It would be nice if Connectix provided a Ghost-like utility.

That would actually be a useful new feature to justify the last upgrade price!

Chris

spam · Feb 12, 2003, 01:19 PM

All right, I deserve it. Somebody tell me to RTFM. I tried a search for Ghost and Virtual PC on Google and found a link to this:

http://www.connectix.com/downloadcen...hdoc_ghost.pdf

Sounds like Ghost should work just fine. I'm sure that Art is right about the fact that I'll end up with a lot of driver problems, but I think it's worth trying.

Art Vandelay · Feb 12, 2003, 02:17 PM

Very interesting. Didn't know you could create a DOS bootup disk with VPC shared folder access. Keep in mind that they are talking about Ghosting between VPCs, not between a PC and a VPC.

Your most critical driver compatibility issue you'll face is for the hard drive controller. If they aren't similar, you'll Blue Screen immediately and there's nothing you can do about it. If you can get booted, then you have a fighting chance.