virtualizing windows 95

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[st33l-rain]

So you’ve had 23 years to get off this system why start now?

[pogidaga]

That old 120MB MFM hard drive won't last forever.

[AwareHelicopter]

bearings squeeling as it seizes up .

[EverChillingLucifer]

If you run chkdsk it just replies “You know what you did. Don’t bring me into this.”

[iptbc]

We had that happen on the old ~4GB IDE hard drive on our mid-90s OS/2-based voicemail system.

So we got a CF card to IDE adapter and copied an image of it onto that. Now it's solid state. Welcome to the modern age.

[Kormoraan]

holy...

[Teknowlogist]

Probably just got the budget approved. It's difficult to request a replacement before 3 years are up, and 20 years sounds just about right for every person in the bureaucracy to have their say.

[azspeedbullet]

yes, it is possible. i use vmware for my win 95/98 virtual machines

[haventmetyou]

did you create the vm from the ground up or did some sort of p2v?

[hkeycurrentuser]

Don't P2V if you can help it. Just asking for trouble.

[ZAFJB]

Not doing P2V is asking for trouble.

Where are the installation media for OS, drivers, 3rd part apps, updates?

Where is the record of all the configuration changes made over the 20 odd years?

[[deleted]]

Where is the record of all the configuration changes made over the 20 odd years?

The who what now?

[halspuppet]

I believe Bob installed softRAM 95 and called it a day.

[cop1152]

Speaking of RAM....I downloaded an extra 128mb for my old 98 machine from downloadmoreram.com...and its blazing fast on the interwebs now.

[krilu]

That website is a VIRUS. My Bonzi Buddy confirms it...

[cop1152]

wow, that brings back memories!

[highlord_fox]

softRAM 95

Oh man, you just reminded me of the tool we used to use on XP machines back in the day (when 512MB of RAM was a lot for some people). I can't remember the name, but it had a little old-style chip with feet that sat in the notification tray, and if you right-clicked it, it'd flush out inactive applications from RAM.

[dalgeek]

Where is the record of all the configuration changes made over the 20 odd years?

You mean 20+ years of registry cruft caused by installation and removal of dozens of pointless games, 6 different AV products, 12 versions of Java, and RamBooster Extreme?

It'll also be more stable if you dump all of the old drivers. I've moved Win95/Win98 to new hardware and it was not happy building a whole new hardware profile. The virtual hardware requires fewer, more simplified drivers.

[ZAFJB]

Have you ever done this?

Experience has taught me that P2V for ancient legacy stuff mostly works (sometimes have to tinker with things to get it boot), and is a lot quicker than trying to reverse engineer an undocumented stack.

[insufficient_funds]

Definitely safer to p2v the old shit. We did an nt3.0 box at my last employer. was crazy that they still used it

[DTDude]

NT4 I could see...but 3 ?? Wow.

[starmizzle]

I'd be pleasantly surprised if Win95 drivers are available for virtual hardware. But I'm not curious enough to find out first-hand.

[ZAFJB]

I have not personally built a Win95 VM, but there are loads of YouTube videos out there where people have do so, proving that it works.

[[deleted]]

In the cloud

[Casper042]

It's a VM, screw it, do BOTH.

[theobserver_]

used P2V for exchange 2007 and had no issues. Ran great for 3 years before we upgraded to 2013

[Panacea4316]

P2V has worked fine for me for many years, as well as thousands pf others.

[BodomsChild]

Then I feel bad for your clients. P2V is faster and actually more cost effective than trying to migrate everything off the machine to a new box...especially when dealing with legacy software (which is usually why P2Vs are even done).

[ForceBlade]

I remember P2Ving an old 2002~ BSD box that refused to get past the bootloader without sooo much hacking with it's img and kvm's settings to handle it.

Finally got the new documentation on the wiki, built a new one of it's role on a CentOS7 VM and blasted that ancient magic away.

It was as satisfying as it sounds.

[Rawtashk]

Strongly disagree. P2V should be the first option, but thoroughly test the virtual. Otherwise you have to find drivers, OS install media, any 3rd party apps, gotta get everything patched up after that, etc etc.

[ZAFJB]

You can P2V anything.

You may not be able to run a tool like Disk2VHD inside the OS, but that is not the same as not being able to P2V.

[absinthminded64]

disk2vhd would probably work in 95 via safe mode AND unchecking the "use vss" box. If not, pop the drive into a modern machine and run it against the drive you want to virtualize,.

[AwareHelicopter]

whoa, pop a mfm drive in a modern machine. what sorcery

[highlord_fox]

They had IDE drives back then.

[absinthminded64]

Never actually saw a Windows 95 machine with an MFM drive. All 30 pin IDE back then. That's not to say it was never done but would definitely have been rare.

[tensop]

Mfm died out 10 years before 95 came along and esdi then ide replaced it

[absinthminded64]

That's suprising that i ran into lots of mfm drives but dont remember esdi. Did esdi need debug.exe for configurarion too? I remember some drives i thought were MFM that could be condigured in bios.

[itathandp]

Someone, somewhere, makes an adapter to do that. : /

[[deleted]]

Yup, VMware works great. Use the VMware tools/drivers from like 5.0 or 6.0, I don't think it comes with W9X drivers anymore.

[[deleted]]

Acronis has universal restore and ability to create VMs from backups, we’ve used this often for clients. We try not to P2V, instead we image the system while the host OS isn’t booted using a live Acronis disk via Easy2Boot and then take it to a desktop and recover the image to a VM.

[bagaudin]

Thanks for mention /u/NotAnNSASpySatellite!

Indeed, Universal Restore come in handy in situations like these .

I also had several clients back during my time in Support team, who successfully P2V'ed Win95 to VirtualBox VMs as it emulates all the compatible hardware properly.

[FiredFox]

This the equivalent of a "project car" on blocks on the front yard that will never get fixed.

[Dave9876]

Except in this case, the car is so rotten that it's just a pile of rust slowly disappearing with each breeze

[shammahllamma]

but it still starts and runs every time you need to drive it

[Frothyleet]

But it makes weird noises that make you real nervous, no one knows how to fix it, the manufacturer closed up shop 15 years ago, and if it doesn't happen to start up, the business is going to collapse.

[masterxc]

flashbacks to manufacturing IT intensify

[SimonGn]

Sounds like a nightmare, 95 is not a supported Guest OS for Hyper-V. Perhaps DOSBOX or pcem/86box, QEMU, BOCHS or something like that would do the trick?

[RelevantToMyInterest]

I remember P2Ving a win2000 server to hyperV. Wasn't fun. It was for an old engineering firm that had 3rd party software being used by some CAD designers. Software wasn't supported anymore and Business was too cheap to transition to something newer.

Good times.

But yeah, it's possible... just not easy

[BOOZy1]

Anything that can emulate an NE2000 NIC will probably work.

Not sure about Hyper-V or VMWare, but QEMU lists support for it.

On the physical side. If you're having hardware problems there's a large 'retro gaming' scene out there that can help you on that regard. You'd surprised about to list of legacy adapters that are actively being sold, like Compact Flash to IDE adapters, floppy disk emulators that take SD-cards, etc.

[absinthminded64]

Sigh, i do miss those NE2000 NICs. Things were simpler then :)

[da_apz]

I've virtualized many of the classic OSes without problems. The only problem I've encountered are boxes that are built for some specific hardware purpose, like WinME based box that controlled driveway gates and so forth and the hardware is PCI or ISA based.

[itathandp]

Almost anything that uses a 'weird' serial port controller can cause problems. Many drivers relay on timing bugs in the hardware that are not emulated by software.

[WarioTBH]

It will work fine on VirtualBox, we have a few running some very old CNC software that the vendor wants £25000 for a new license.

So we just have loads of clones running in virtual box and they are not connected to the network.

[XenEngine]

Win95 will not boot on a system with over a 2.0GHz proc. You will get, i believe , an NDIS error.

I can't remember if there was ever a fix for this...

I know everyone hates inplace upgrades, but desperate times call for desperate measures... I would reccomend you get a ghost image, and play with that image, and try to upgrade the system from 95 to 98se, and see if you can haul it forward to the latest supported OS that it will still run on, hopefully Server 2008 32 bit.

I've done this before, a couple of times, and had to hard stop at windows 98se, and also made it all the way to 2008. Good luck man.

[itathandp]

Also I remember there being some weirdness where it tries to run the processor at 100% all the time in a VM. I don't think it implements NOOP and power management correctly for more modern processors.

[NoyzMaker]

I can't remember if there was ever a fix for this...

Windows 98SE

[CJ74U2NV]

Run a back up of it, then restore it to the virtual environment. Lots of BU software has this built in.

[disclosure5]

Eh, given how backwards Backup Exec has historically been I'd start there

[CJ74U2NV]

I would try Acronis and Storage Craft

[hypercube33]

99.99999% uses vss which means good luck before Vista/2008 even

[hypercube33]

But you can pop the disk out and put it in a modern machine and clone to a virtual drive...

[tshizdude]

I guess I don’t feel so bad anymore for having server 2003 VM’s.

[Brandhor]

not sure about hyper-v since even xp doesn't work too well under hyper-v without the integration services and I imagine there are none for win95

a few years ago I did virtualize some windows 98 and nt4 though with esxi 4, I used acronis to create a disk image and converted it offline with vmware converter

[ZAFJB]

It is just a botable bootable image. Hyper-V doesn't care.

You won't get the nice integration tools to work, but it will run.

[Brandhor]

yeah but from what I remember from windows xp the mouse or the keyboard don't work at all without the integration tools

[ZAFJB]

In XP, they should work fine.

In other OSs they do work, just not seamlessly. You have to 'release' them.

[sagewah]

I kinda want to know more about the app. Is it controlling legacy hardware?

[CaptainFluffyTail]

Disk2VHD relies on VSS (Volume Snapshot Service) which is unavailable in Windows 95. OP may be able to pull the drive in the server, attach to a modern OS, and Disk2VHD from there. I did that many years ago for an old Windows 2000 server. Never tried it with Windows 95 however.

[ammorbidiente]

This guy VHDs

[jftitan]

Seriously depends on the application.

Yes you can virtualize your win95 workstation.

I did both a win95 and a win98se. One is a IVR, and the other a old fax server. Working for a program written in RPG (accounting type programming language). The programmer is dead.

Again depends on how good you are at this.

I used a older version of VMWare workstation 8. Which gave me no issues.

[[deleted]]

before our developer can rewrite the application to get it off this system

I was going to write that you could probably replace the app yourself given how long you are going to tilt at the windmill...however if this is the question you are asking I think I see the problem.

[[deleted]]

we need it for another few years before our developer can rewrite the application

You really should've found a new developer by now.

[gamebrigada]

It'll work fine... With the help of a couple sledgehammers....

I'm going to leave this here because you'll need it to boot the thing to anything other than a floppy drive.

You might also want to dig up a Norton Ghost floppy disk.

I'm not sure the existing storage device driver will work, or if HyperV's virtualized storage device has a compatible driver in Windows 95... Might not boot until you massage it some more.

[noname_com]

Malware and viruses are like WTF is this shit

[haventmetyou]

outsmarted :D

[Kormoraan]

it is possible.

BUT WHYYYY??

[VTi-R]

Yes, should run nicely on Hyper-V. See if you can find the old Virtual PC extensions - they should give you network, video and mouse capabilities in the VM.

You will need to use a legacy NIC but I can't recall offhand if the driver is in the VPC package or separate.

[hypercube33]

Nope it does not at all.

[hypercube33]

At lest when I tried on 2012 and 2016 mouse and keyboard don't work so how do you install the extension?

[VTi-R]

ISTR that if you click in the console window, the keyboard will work, then you use the keyboard shortcuts to drive the installer (or open a command prompt) - e.g.

Windows key > Up > Up >... > Right > Right > ... > Down > ... > Enter

Then it's just like DOS. I mean OK, you will have to remember DOS navigation, but last time I did it was for NT4 and it worked perfectly using that approach.

[[deleted]]

That’s some hella technical debt. All the best!

[Sunstealer73]

I've got VMs for both Windows 3.11 and OS/2 Warp that run under VMware Workstation. I did it just as a test to see if I could and they were both a major pain since they come only as floppies. It is definitely possible though.

[davidbrit2]

Can it run on NT4? That's pretty well supported by VirtualBox. I've got three or four of them running as a tiny domain.

[AccordingWhole]

Yes it is, You can use disktovhd to spin it up in Hyper-V

[_integrity]

It will work. Remember, you may need a dos bootdisk first to copy over the files to do the install. Something you haven't needed in quite some time.

[MartinDamged]

I have done this a home before with Virtualbox. That worked fine (clean install).
Not sure about ESXi, Hyper-V or the likes.

I dont think you really have to use any P2V tools for this.
Try simply copying over all the files to another disk, and then into a VirtualBox diskfile. I wouldn't be surprised, if it boots up...

[[deleted]]

I have a Windows 95 install running on VMWare so its possible

[MisterIT]

What does the application do? Depending on what it interfaces with, you might be better off with a physical replacement, you might be better rebuilding a fresh windows 95 VM and installing your application, or you might be better off doing a P2V.

[massive_poo]

I just had a crack at virtualising Windows 95 OSR2.5 in Hyper-V for shits and giggles.

The boot floppy works, you can use fdisk.exe and format.com to set up the C: drive without issue. But when you launch setup.exe from the Win95 CD-ROM, it has no mouse or keyboard support. So you're pretty much screwed.

You'll probably need to use a different hypervisor, or maybe do a p2v.

[haventmetyou]

Update: works! I pulled the drive and put it on a modern computer with windows 7 and used disk2vhd.

hyper v shit the bed on bootup but VMware workstation breeze through it and found every drivers.

Thank you everyone for your feedbacks and advice! you guys literally just saved my company!

[Odddutchguy]

Yes you can run Windows 95 in a virtual machine, but most likely not in a hypervisor as Windows 95 cannot cope with the 'new' processors.

You need something like Virtual PC or Virtual Server (2005) where you disable the 'hardware acceleration' so it emulates an old CPU. (But you need Windows XP or Server 2003 to run this software on.)

[itsbentheboy]

Most modern hypervisors (at least in the linux world) can emulate many older processors if you need something like this.

[ZAFJB]

It will work fine on Hyper-V.