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Christopher Tozzi explains how virtualize a image from our old systems (installed in older machines) in a machine traditional Modern y powerful. |
Years passed, Windows 3.1 went out of style, and we have all come to use a long series of faster and more powerful machines. My PS / 1 was removed to the basement a long time ago, along with about a half dozen other computers that together probably have less computing power than my current cell phone.
I'm never going to use that hardware again, and should probably get rid of it. But as a computer geek and aspiring professional historian, the idea of ​​forever losing access to machines, and all the data on them, struck me as wrong. It would mean giving up part of the past - even if it is nothing more than my personal trajectory - and entering it into the ether, where no one can examine it again.
Fortunately, there is a solution. With a handful of free, open source tools, I have been able to turn my old PCs into virtual machines and boot them into my modern computers. This solution allows you not only to access data stored on older desktops, but to run the system almost exactly as it used to be.
The process is simple. First, I took the hard drives from my old PCs and connected them to the desktop I use today (which fortunately supports SCSI interfaces, otherwise this could have been a problem). Then I used the dd tool, which is built into almost all Linux distributions, to dump the contents of the disks into the raw image files with a command like:
dd if = / dev / sda of = / path / to / files / disk1.img
And then I just started the KVM hypervisor to boot the disk images:
kvm / path / to / files / disk1.img
This should work with a variety of virtualization platforms, such as VMware and VirtualBox, but KVM is simpler as it installs easily on Ubuntu. In addition, it supports "factory direct" raw disk images, whereas most other hypervisors generally require proprietary disk formats.
Source: Var guy