38
« on: June 06, 2021, 03:07:41 pm »
I have done this for zonks, I believe there was a small article on the eComStation Facebook page that I wrote on the subject ca 2011, that was removed by Facebook when they changed the rules on article and file permissions when they split groups into groups and pages. I never bothered restoring it elsewhere since no-one ever showed any interest in the technique anyway, just like there was no interest in running OS/2 in a Hyper-V container.
Although in general it is very helpful, there are a few issues doing this, while VB etc. are highly compatible with real hardware there are edge cases of incompatibility, you can end up with an image that boots on VB but not on real hardware and vise versa. It can sometimes by tricky to place an image onto a drive correctly especially if you have multiple partitions and boot drives, for those cases investing in DFSee becomes an absolute must, alignment issues are frequent with any sort of solid state media for instance. The weird behavior of the VirtualBox image manager in recent versions can make maintaining a large number of VBox images and copies a real pain (unlike VirtualPC, VBox registers (and re-registers) each image into a database). Each version of VBox introduces a new collection of bugs which can throw a spanner into the works, these get fixed eventually but OS/2 is not high upon their priority list (and they are downright hostile to ArcaOS), not a huge issue with images but this makes install in-place frequently impossible on modern VBox which was relatively easy on older VBox versions. In-Place installs were extremely convenient since you could remount the drive on VBox in you had any problems on real hardware. On older versions of OS/2 getting data onto the virtual machine can in some cases be much more time consuming than on real hardware, weirdly enough. etc etc etc
I only really use this technique these days for when installing "legacy" versions of the system, that means I do not have to bother with floppies and I can get the system into a fixpack state that will actually run on the hardware (memory & disk size & driver issues etc). Apart from that and for the fact that I already have a large collection of ready made VBox images, I am not altogether sure I would use the technique except for installing onto systems that run on consumer solid state media eg. embedded systems with SDCards, thin clients with Compact Flash drives or old IDE PC's with CF adapters. In those cases it is very quick, just plonk a converted VBox image onto start of the SD drive and then create other partitions as needed from the install.
I am currently setting up a couple of old VIA C3 systems for compatibility testing, basically each system has 2 or 3 "legacy" Windows installs on primary partitions and a host of various "common" OS/2 versions in an extended partitions. I had intended to convert and copy already made basic installs from VBox onto the extended partition but in the end it actually made more sense time wise to buy a floppy emulator off eBay, load it with a large collection of OS/2 installer floppy images and install from there.
Using PCE rather than VirtualBox also has some advantages since Windows can mount the PCE images directly, you can load software onto the PCE image that contains a windows readable partition type directly from the file manager or folder. It also has a better hardware compatibility in some cases.
And remember you can also go the other way round, DFSee can easily convert your existing OS/2 installs into VBox images.
Show Posts