Virtualizing a WinXP system

[edy]

I'm not sure if this classifies exactly as "vintage" computing but I have an old WinXP machine that I'm trying to virtualize using VMWare vCenter Converter Standalone and the thing keeps giving me an error "Unable to create a VSS snapshot of the source volume. Error code 2147754774".  It's only 35 GB used space on a 450 GB hard drive, and I'm trying to create the image to the same volume.

I've followed various online trouble-shooting pages regarding turning the VSS on and off, re-registering the DLL's, rebooting, etc.... all to no avail.    There has to be a simpler way to just rip an image of the drive. Any help would be appreciated.

[Benta]

I've not used VMWare myself, but Oracle Virtualbox with W95, Win XP and Vista without any problems.
Perhaps that's worth a try?

[1xrtt]

There is a Sysinternals utility to convert live disks into vhd images, which are supported by vmware, virtualbox and hyper-v.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd
I never used it, so no guarantees, but it may worth a try.

[Whales]

You could make a raw disk image using other (non-VM related) tools.  Most (all?) VM suites support raw disk images, many have tools to convert them to more space-efficient formats if desired too.

[Halcyon]

Yeh sorry, can't help you with VMware. It's given me too many headaches in the past so I dumped it in favour of Proxmox years ago.

[edy]

Thanks for the suggestions. I downloaded disk2vhd directly from Microsoft but for some strange reason when I run it I get the "not a valid win32 application" error. I'm going to try downloading to another computer and copy it over, see if I get the same problem. It's strange because disk2vhd was a ZIP file that downloaded, and I was able to correctly unzip it and get files out. If the download was corrupt, how am I able to unzip it? Is there a problem with the unzip software producing corrupt output? Strange? This was directly from Microsoft, unless it is a 64-bit only file, although it did not mention the option to download 32 bit.

I'm having issue with a lot of web browsing on this machine, Google Chrome is outdated and not supporting WinXP anymore. About 50% of websites I try give me this "NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID" message telling me my clock is ahead, even though the system time is correctly set. There is obviously something wrong with the certificates, probably all expired. Internet Explorer is worse, refused to connect at all. I only need the machine for 1 piece of software I need to configure my old VOIP system from a company that was bought up, and no longer supports it.

Right now I'm deleting useless programs I don't need and trying to tighten it up to under 30 GB, and also defragging. I ran the script used to re-register vss and tested that all the commands work "vssadmin list providers, list writers, list shadows"... etc.

Will see how it goes. If that doesn't work, somebody posted that CloneZilla may do it. Otherwise if anyone has a suggestion for me to just boot a Linux USB stick, perhaps use a tool on that system to make an image. I just want to make sure I only capture the 30 GB and not try to image the full 450 GB drive it's on which is a waste of space.

The other option (perhaps easier) is try to find the install disk of the VOIP configuration software and just install it to a fresh WinXPMode system. That may be cleaner and more efficient but I won't have had the practice/experience of cloning an existing machine (which is what I'd like to learn).

[Whales]

You're not trying to run your imaging tools from within the OS that's on the disk, are you?

(If so: I really don't recommend that, you need that disk/partition to be completely offline and not in used whilst it's being imaged, or you'll run into infinite problems with consistency and probably even runtime permissions.)

[SiliconWizard]

Thanks for the suggestions. I downloaded disk2vhd directly from Microsoft but for some strange reason when I run it I get the "not a valid win32 application" error. I'm going to try downloading to another computer and copy it over, see if I get the same problem. It's strange because disk2vhd was a ZIP file that downloaded, and I was able to correctly unzip it and get files out. If the download was corrupt, how am I able to unzip it? Is there a problem with the unzip software producing corrupt output? Strange? This was directly from Microsoft, unless it is a 64-bit only file, although it did not mention the option to download 32 bit.

The zip file linked above contains both 32-bit and 64-bit executables. If you didn't download this zip file but used another link, then I dunno, but I'd be pretty sure it'd be a 64-bit executable.
So download the zip file and run 'disk2vhd.exe' if you are on a 32-bit Windows.

[edy]

You're not trying to run your imaging tools from within the OS that's on the disk, are you?

(If so: I really don't recommend that, you need that disk/partition to be completely offline and not in used whilst it's being imaged, or you'll run into infinite problems with consistency and probably even runtime permissions.)

Yes I think that is best. I wanted to find some Linux USB tool that I could boot up and then have it take an image of the hard drive. Is there any solution that will grab only the used space (i.e. 30 GB) or will it take a full image of the 450 GB drive? Or should I be trying to partition the drive first into the first 40 GB or so, that way I can have it only image the first partition?

[Whales]

I believe clonezilla might support that, have a read of their docs.  I normally use it in disk->disk copy mode (instead of disk->image mode) which it definitely supports different sized source and targets in.

[Bud]

I'm having issue with a lot of web browsing on this machine, Google Chrome is outdated and not supporting WinXP anymore. About 50% of websites I try give me this "NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID" message telling me my clock is ahead, even though the system time is correctly set. There is obviously something wrong with the certificates, probably all expired.

Most likely the CA certificate store has to be updated on your XP computer. Normally these updates happen as part of Windows updates. But since MS does not update XP anymore the existing certs expired. If you need browsing on that machine then you may want to google how to update certificate store on XP.

[DiTBho]

There is a Sysinternals utility to convert live disks into vhd images, which are supported by vmware, virtualbox and hyper-v.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd
I never used it, so no guarantees, but it may worth a try.

Super useful, thanks!!!

[ve7xen]

You're not trying to run your imaging tools from within the OS that's on the disk, are you?

(If so: I really don't recommend that, you need that disk/partition to be completely offline and not in used whilst it's being imaged, or you'll run into infinite problems with consistency and probably even runtime permissions.)

Yes I think that is best. I wanted to find some Linux USB tool that I could boot up and then have it take an image of the hard drive. Is there any solution that will grab only the used space (i.e. 30 GB) or will it take a full image of the 450 GB drive? Or should I be trying to partition the drive first into the first 40 GB or so, that way I can have it only image the first partition?

As mentioned, PartClone (used by CloneZilla) will only copy used blocks, assuming it understands the source filesystem (and it should for FAT32 or NTFS). But I am not sure if it can actually shrink the resulting image, since I don't think it rewrites the block indexes, but it will at least make the process a lot faster if the disk is not that populated.

There is an ntfsresize tool included on the GParted live CD (which also includes PartClone), so if you needed to make a smaller image, you can use that to first resize the partition before imaging it, assuming partclone can't do this itself.

If you have the space temporarily for the full image generated by partclone, once you have the raw image somewhere, you can use qemu-img to convert it to the desired virtual disk image format, which may be sparse and/or compressed. Since partclone won't copy unallocated blocks, if you allow generation of a sparse image here, it should be able to sparseify all the free blocks.

[rob77]

just copy the xp disk to a file with dd on a linux machine.. then use qemu-img to convert that file to vmdk format.

something like:

dd if=/dev/sdXX of=./imagefile bs=4M status=progress
qemu-img convert -O vmdk imagefile vmdkname.vmdk

then copy the vmdk to your datastore, create a new VM ,make sure it's bios not uefi and use correct scsi adapter for XP (scsi hba driver must be set to start at boot time on that XP, otherwise you get blue stop error on boot) , attach the vmdk and boot