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IDE/ATA jumper settings suck! You can quote me on that. Luckily I had an IDE/ATA to SATA adapter that I used in conjunction with the new box. I tried to boot a Linux live environment from USB, but that failed (not sure why though the BIOS can handle USB as boot devices – it even listed the thumb drive as bootable – and the specific Linux image I used should have worked with legacy boot). Already this was somewhat of an adventure since I didn’t want to move the PC and I didn’t own any IDE/ATA to USB adapters I could have used with my notebook. So the way I went about this problem is probably heavily influenced by that.įirst, I created a disk image from the hard drive (Retrospectively, this should have been the very first thing to do, just in case the hard drive failed during my experiments.). My next idea was the title of this post: How hard could it be to virtualize the old box onto the new one? Turned out: Very.Īs a side note: I use Arch (btw). But because of the way the client used the accounting software, that didn’t work either.Īs a makeshift solution, I also tried to copy the application files of the new(er) version over, but after spending an hour manually copying DLL files, and altering registry entries (foreshadowing), I finally gave up. There was an additional piece of software I found by accident that was perfect for dealing with the historic transaction data that we failed to transfer. Exporting and reimporting the data didn’t work either, because for some stupid licensing reason the import was not allowed. Anyhow: The old version could not deal with the backup format of the new(er) one. Presumably, there was some online update at some point. After taking a quick look it was apparent that the version of the software on the old machine was much newer. There was already some groundwork done: They installed the software from the original CD and transferred the core data, but they couldn’t figure out how to transfer the transaction data. But for some odd reason, they still wanted to use that hoary accounting software (that, by the way, can’t really deal with dates after 2021). Anyway: They finally realized that the old box wasn’t going to survive for much longer, so they bought a new PC. Yet, within hours I completely regretted taking on the task. I already kinda knew what I was getting myself into since I already swapped the hard drive once (back then I even had to ask a friend who’s into retro tech for a favor because I simply didn’t have any IDE/ATA hard disks). The hard drive was about to die, and there were no backups to speak of. They had a pretty awful setup: A computer from 2001 running Windows XP and some sort of accounting software that boasts with “year-2000-safe” on the packaging.
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So when an acquaintance asked for help with their PC I naturally said I would take a look. So, to give some context: In my village, I’m kinda the girl Friday of computer stuff. If you are only interested in the technical part, just scroll down to “The Solution”. So, this is a small write-up of my adventure of trying to virtualize an ancient Windows XP installation in VirtualBox. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! me, while trying to debug this sh*t.