My mother recently bought a Mac to replace her aging Dell. She still needed to be able to use all her old applications though, and many of them were only available for Windows.
Virtual machines to the rescue! (almost)
VMWare has had a Mac version of their workstation product available for a while now, and I’ve been using it on my Macbook with no issues, so I decided to try and get her old machine stuffed into a vm. Some searching turned up this article, which explained how take the contents of the old computer’s hard drive and create a .vmdk file for use with VMWare. I booted with Knoppix, and ran:
qemu-img convert -f raw /dev/hda -O vmdk boot.vmdk
which produced a file that VMWare was able to boot from – so far so good. Unfortunately, Windows didn’t really like being transplanted like that, and refused to let anyone log-in until it had been activated again. After a call to Microsoft, I was told that OEM installs of Windows “die with the computer they were shipped with”, and that we would need to buy a new license for the new computer, which is what my mother decided to do.
I will be trying this again with Linux in the near future, as I’ve got a few old machines acting as servers that could be consolidated into one box with virtualization, and they shouldn’t complain about anything but hardware changes (I hope…)