It's been a while since the Embedded license for Windows 2000 was discontinued, but legacy Windows is being slaughtered. There is an inquiry about NT.
In the case of Windows 2000 generation, it is still possible to physically provide hardware (license will be in the form of using the customer's possession), but if it becomes Windows 98 or NT, it will work hardware. It has become difficult to prepare the wear itself.
In such a situation, if you really want to use the old OS, you can consider moving to a virtualized environment. If you cannot prepare the hardware with the old specifications, prepare the hardware environment with the current specifications and build the old OS environment "logically" in it.
This time, I prepared a virtual environment and tried to migrate the old OS. We will briefly report how far you can move software and devices. I hope you find it helpful.
usage environment
| Destination PC | PC with Windows 1907 installed on our evaluation machine (CD-7) |
| PC you want to migrate | Windows 98SE/Windows NT 4.0 |
| Virtual environment construction software | VMware (using Workstation 1.0) |
Transitional means
■The following procedure is just an example. In case of reference, please take responsibility at your own risk.
In the case of legacy OS, file format conversion is required several times in order to migrate to the current virtual OS. This time, I took the method of directly taking out the physical drive and converting it.
1)After creating a backup on a PC with Windows 98SE installed, remove the hard disk and connect it to the destination machine with a USB connection.
2)Convert physical HDD to virtual HDD (VHD format) with "DISK2VHD".
3)Convert the VHD format disk image to VMDK format with the conversion tool. Use the one that suits your environment.
4)Create a "new virtual machine" in VMware (specify the converted VMDK file to HDD).
-Create a custom file and select the VMDK file as the original disk.
・ Since a vmx file will be created automatically, convert it in step 5.
5)"VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.5Convert with.
6)If you go to this point, you can start up on VMware. If possible, you should uninstall the old driver and install the drivers using VMware Tools.
This procedure successfully migrated Windows NT4 and Windows 98SE.
Afterword
With this procedure, all the software installed in the environment before the migration worked normally.
Regarding the device, the expansion card connected to the PCI slot was recognized and operated, but unfortunately the ISA bus (bridge chip control) installed in the evaluation machine did not operate.It seemed to be recognized as a device, but I gave up because I didn't have the driver for my ISA bus card.
Regarding the expansion card, it seems possible to use it on the virtual OS if the inserted card is recognized by the host side. However, when there is a demand for severe things such as communication speed, it may be difficult to operate in virtual, so there is a part that you can not understand unless you try it, but a legacy environment is absolutely necessary. If so, I think it's worth trying.
This time it was a legacy OS migration report of host type, but if there is an opportunity, I would like to report on a hypervisor type.