10-10-2026, 07:59 PM
USB & Serial seem to work OK via the VM in most cases. XP, W7 & W10.
MS broke NT multiboot with Vista. Before then it was very flexible and could boot OS on a different drive or partition, inc DOS, win 9x, OS.2, other versions of NT and Linux. You could copy a boot sector to a file and point to that with boot.ini, but when CPUs with virtualisation support, 64 bit and 16G or more RAM came it was simpler to use Oracle Virtual Box. That was MS solution for VB6 / XP / Win 2K / Vista / 32 bit Win7 on Win 10 64 bit, so then even released a tool to clone a PC to a VHD file:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysint...s/disk2vhd
This is intended to clone older PCs to a VM on Win10, but with a bit of fiddling with settings it works for XP & Win7 (likely Win2K & Vista & Win 8 too) on Linux. The major requirement is that the PC to be cloned must be booting using "legacy" or BIOS mode, not UEFI. Even a PC with a UEFI "bios" a 64bit Win7 clone worked because someone had installed it in "legacy" boot mode.
You need the Guest Utils, so a VM of NT earlier than XP or Win9x is crippled as that is only XP or later. At some stage Oracle decided that the XP 3D accelerator (needed for Direct 3D, not always actual 3D) was a security risk and disabled it rather than fix it. So now some programs unsupported on Vista/Win7 don't work on the XP VM. Sometimes WINE works. The VB6 programs with OCX like serial port fail on 64 bit Windows, but usually work on WINE. You can install 32 bit WINE, but sadly by default you get the less useful 64 bit version.
Win9x / WFW3.11 / DOS are all better now in an Emulator on Linux than on a VM. There are some very accurate ones for games.
MS broke NT multiboot with Vista. Before then it was very flexible and could boot OS on a different drive or partition, inc DOS, win 9x, OS.2, other versions of NT and Linux. You could copy a boot sector to a file and point to that with boot.ini, but when CPUs with virtualisation support, 64 bit and 16G or more RAM came it was simpler to use Oracle Virtual Box. That was MS solution for VB6 / XP / Win 2K / Vista / 32 bit Win7 on Win 10 64 bit, so then even released a tool to clone a PC to a VHD file:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysint...s/disk2vhd
This is intended to clone older PCs to a VM on Win10, but with a bit of fiddling with settings it works for XP & Win7 (likely Win2K & Vista & Win 8 too) on Linux. The major requirement is that the PC to be cloned must be booting using "legacy" or BIOS mode, not UEFI. Even a PC with a UEFI "bios" a 64bit Win7 clone worked because someone had installed it in "legacy" boot mode.
You need the Guest Utils, so a VM of NT earlier than XP or Win9x is crippled as that is only XP or later. At some stage Oracle decided that the XP 3D accelerator (needed for Direct 3D, not always actual 3D) was a security risk and disabled it rather than fix it. So now some programs unsupported on Vista/Win7 don't work on the XP VM. Sometimes WINE works. The VB6 programs with OCX like serial port fail on 64 bit Windows, but usually work on WINE. You can install 32 bit WINE, but sadly by default you get the less useful 64 bit version.
Win9x / WFW3.11 / DOS are all better now in an Emulator on Linux than on a VM. There are some very accurate ones for games.
