Ditto. Sounds like a lot of work and too many chances for me to screw something up. I've got a good-running 2000 machine, so I'll leave it alone, bite the bullet and get a new one. Another expense...
Now a new problem - all the new machines have Win 8 or 8.1 installed. I have a new OEM Win 7 DVD, so ... here we go again....
| > You can also install Linux and use that as a boot manager, | > but in my experience Linux is somewhat brittle, so I don't | > like to depend on it. Also, the Linux partitioning/booting | > tools are poorly designed and not at all intuitive. It's very | > easy to accidentally erase Windows while trying to get Linux | > installed. | | I never had Linux erase Windows.
Not on its own, but it's not easy to avoid mishaps. Linux uses a different naming system for partitions and recent versions are apt to "suggest" installing to the first partition and thereby erasing it. (It used to be that Linux was designed for Windows people setting up a second boot, but these days it's more apt to assume, like Windows, that it's the only show in town.)
I have a dozen-odd partitions on 2 disks. The only way to be sure the Linux installer does what I want is to carefully write down the partition sizes before proceeding and then match those up to what the Linux installer reports. Someone new to the whole thing is likely to get confused at that point and accept the suggested choice, possibly losing their Windows install in the process.
| Using 2 physical drives should avoid the problem.
I've multi-booted for many years and have no trouble, but I don't depend on either Linux or Windows to handle things. I do all partitioning and boot management with BootIt.
Just get a used computer off ebay that has win xp already on it with the COA on the computer. With the coa you can always reinstall xp if needed.
It's hard to be specific when you won't disclose your "special situation." We have to read between the lines.
When I suggested a second computer, I meant a $1 garage sale computer with XP on it. Last summer, they were so plentiful that I had to quit picking up the free ones. It's hard to get more than one bungee'd onto a motorcycle. As time marches on, the $1/Free machines are running Vista. And, despite all the bitching about it, Vista runs quite well for most things.
And there are refurbs showing up on the web all the time.
If you're gonna buy a new computer with preinstalled windows 8.1 it seems wasteful to use up a perfectly good win7 license.
I like win7 best, but I played with win8.1. If you put on one of the startmenu fix programs, you really can't tell much difference. I put links to all the programs I use on the desktop and rarely use any part of the windows user interface anyway. Once you get past the bad press and patch the start menu, it's perfectly usable. And unless you're willing to switch to Linux, you don't have much choice going forward. Get used to it! ;-)
If you can wait a bit, Windows 10 is around the corner. You can download a free pre-release that's good for six months?? Seems to work OK for everything I tried, just provides nothing new that I want. I forgot to rearm it and it expired. But, you'll have to buy and reload the final version.
No matter what you do, coming from win2K, you're likely to run into driver and compatibility issues, but advice on that will have to wait for some disclosure of the "special situation."
I liked win2k. I'd still be using it if they had drivers for recent hardware. I tried to put win2K on a current generation machine. Didn't have drivers for sound/video/lan. Basically useless.
This is absolutely the wrong newsgroup to get help on this topic. But, we do what we can to help.
You should be able to find an XP pro machine for $50 or less with the benefit that it may have an Office COA on it too. Companies are throwing them away although most may already be gone. I just got a 3mz dual core Dell, 3g memory, XP pro with an upgrade display card (HDMI) and full office 2007 COA ... on it's way to a dumpster. As long as you have the COAs with the number, you can reload it from scratch.
Glad you have abandoned your idea of loading XP on your Win2k machine. You'd go through a lot of work just to still have a now obsolete OS along with obsolete hardware.
If you get a new Win8 machine there is no need to put Win7 on it.
All you need is to install the latest version of Classic Shell (free) and it will convert the GUI into one virtually identical to Win7
No tiles to deal with.
If you load Win7 on a new machine , more than likely you can kiss the warranty goodbye.
Actually, my experience here is that you and others on this group are LOTS more help than the typical computer group. I have tried getting help with anything from computers to cars and everything in between on what should be a more appropriate group but this one by far has the most diverse and knowledgeable, helpful and practical folks.
Other favorites for "real" help I have found are rec.crafts.metalworking and rec.gardens - 2nd and 3rd to this one.
You are making this unnessarily difficult:
Just boot from the XP CD and tell the installer to put XP on your E: drive. No need to manually copy anything to the hard drive. The XP CD will extract the needed files from the CD *and* set up a boot menu for you.
John
Virtual machines are a good idea, although it helps to have plenty of RAM.
Also, I find it better to use Linux for the host machine. It's more stable, and makes backups (of the Windows machines) easy. The whole Windows disk is a file on the Linux system.
BTW, When the physical machine I had this setup (multiple Windows on Linux host) on failed, it was very easy to transfer everything to another computer. There was a minor problem with a different IP address, but otherwise everything went well.
I did too. I remember when I called XP the "high blood sugar*" version.
BTW, what actually got me to change is that I got a high-speed internet connection, and that didn't work so well with w2k (IIRC, it would limit speed to about 1Mbps per TCP connection, rather than the 8mbps I had).
Drivers made for XP would usually work, but now that's old too. I usually just use w2k on old computers.
[snip]
Yep. I went so far as to extract all the drivers from an XP cd and once decompressed, I burned them to a cd so I could use them on the Win2k machines I worked on.
The only drivers that caused problems were on-board video.
For win7 32bit machines I did manage to find a driver DVD that "picks up" most drivers not included with the OS
Maybe, if you're building from scratch and buying new licenses. For most of us, owning a windows machine, it's far less stressful to run linux virtually.
Linux may not have drivers for your lan interface or all the functions of your mouse or your sound card or..or..or. But Linux probably does have drivers for the emulated devices.
Windows copy protection is rather fragile. I've had windows revert to "pirated" after an update of VirtualBox. Or a change in memory allocated to the windows virtual machine.
I haven't looked recently, but I never found a way to convert a preinstalled licensed native windows installation to a licensed virtual windows installation. Yes, there are tutorials, I just never made any of them work in the time I was willing to devote to it. Not a problem if you started with a license key that validates online. If you start with an OEM-specific version that self-validates, that can be an issue. Yes, there are tutorials for that too. And if linux is your primary focus, you'll probably enjoy the fun of trying to make all that work.
I have no idea what all this new disk configuration strategy and locking the install to the BIOS does relative to installing windows virtually.
My experience too. It works great up until the time that it doesn't. Keep a copy of the VM so you can recover if the activation gets trashed.
Agreed. I have 16 gig of RAM. VMWare sings on this configuration! :)
VMWare's vCenter Converter (a free program) will create a virtual machine from a physical machine. When I upgraded to Win7 a few years ago, I used it (or a similar product) to create a virtual image of my Windows Vista box and it worked fine.
If you have problems with a Windows machine reverting to pirated, a call to Microsoft is all that should be necessary to right it. As long as you legitimately own a licanse, they'll 'fix' it for you over the phone.
I'll check that one out. I've got a lot of stuff running under virtualbox. I'm a little bit afraid of VMWare competing for resources. I guess there are also utilities to convert a VMWare virtual disk to something compatible with virtualbox.
I have used utilities that claimed to do the same thing. In at least one case, I was presented with the "do you want to activate windows online now or reboot" screen. Since the lan driver had changed, I couldn't get online. Didn't try the phone, because I believed I was clearly in violation of the license terms...Maybe it would have worked anyway. I think I also tried syspreping the system before converting with similar results. The symptom does seem to vary with the hardware and software setup.
Well, I believe that what you say is true. If you have a preinstalled windows that you remove, by whatever means, and reinstall, by whatever means, to a virtual machine, you probably run afoul of your license terms. And how do you manage the partitions and the windows boot partition? Everything I've read says that in order to remove the boot partition, you have do to some manual editing in the configurations/pointers. That should be way more complex than just pointing vmware at the virtual C: drive??
For me, the bottom line was, using a win7 host ain't broke, don't fix it. I'm far more likely to want to run a different version of another linux distro than another windows instance. Linux is far more robust in the face of hardware changes for the hardware that it supports.
One thing I just realized is that my source system was a single-core hyperthreaded machine that windows reported at two processors. The target machine's virtual setup allocated only one processor. Wonder if that had any effect on the HAL? So many variables...so little time...
[snip]
The above (building from scratch...) works better, but you can't do that with a laptop.
Windows is still more fragile, SOME of which you described below.
True. Also, sometimes Linux works better with those devices.
It is. That may be my biggest reason for preferring win2k.
BTW, I DO NOT support using Windows without paying for it, and have never done so. I do wish to avoid the problems caused by corporate paranoia, with Windows constantly assuming you did that ("guilty until proven innocent, and then guilty again").
I haven't either. I would create a new installation for the VM. It may take longer, but you get something better.
OEM versions are often made to work only with certain hardware, and so refuse to install on a VM. I try to avoid using them, but actually buy a Windows CD.
And will have learned something in the process.
Sounds like you're referring to "secure boot". This does not work with BIOS, but with recent UEFI firmware, which is a replacement for BIOS.
You may need to turn this off to use Linux as a primary OS (Ubuntu supports secure boot). This will have no effect on installing a VM.
My regular backup on that machine (data backup, simpler on Linux) includes both the VM and the file that contains the system drive for it.
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