Virtual disks revisted…

Again for Linux/ OSX users, it’s no big deal as they have access to the ‘dd’ command. Well I was installing AT&T SYSVr4 when it hit me that you can somewhat convert physical disks with Virtual PC & Qemu…
linked disk1
In Virtual PC you can create a ‘virtual disk’ that links to a physical volume..
linked disk2

And again, just select a physical slave disk with your legacy OS already installed.

Once the disk is linked, re-run the utility and you can then convert the linked disk into a dynamic disk. Once you have your .vhd, you can use Qemu’s qemu-img tool to convert the disk image into qcow,qcow2 (Qemu) or even VMDK for VMWare. The syntax is pretty simple..

qemu-img convert –f vpc attsysv.vhd –O qcow attsysv.dsk

I’ve tested it with AT&T SYSVr4 & OS/2 1.3! Much to my amazement with the fixpacks, OS/2 1.3 will actually RUN on Virtual PC 2007. It’s a shame that IBM saw the SDK’s for OS/2 as a revenue generation opportunity, as it’s amazing how quick it is (once it’s done initializing….) but I guess that’s a given of any 16bit OS that’s written in assembly….

For the heck of it, here’s a screenshot.

OS/2 1.3 running from a linked disk

OS/2 1.3 running from a linked disk

 

A minor update….

OS/2 1.3 on Bochs

OS/2 1.3 on Bochs

OS/2 1.3 does infact run under BOCHS. Here is the catch, like Xenix you currently must make an image of an existing installation, and point Bochs towards it.

Here is the flag that I used:
ata0-master: type=disk, path=”os2-1.3.img”, cylinders=919, heads=16, spt=17

Bochs will complain about the geometry not matching… Just hit the ignore button, and it boots up just fine.

Thanks to Geoff Shearer for trying, since I had figured it wouldn’t even work.

I promise, a quick tour of SLS Linux next time… Where the distro wars all started!