Windows 2000 PC image to newer PC.

sswats · 17 Oct 2012 at 13:39

I have a program that is installed on an old Windows 2000 machine. It was custom programmed and installed 9 years ago and the disk is long gone.
Since then we've just had a ghost image of the whole disk drive and about 4 identical PCs. as one failed we transferred it over to the next.
Unfortunately we're now running out of PC's and they're slow anyway and its become a dedicated machine just for this program which is not necessary and takes up space.

So any ideas on how to get the program over to a newer PC? OR even run the whole hard disk image as a VM somehow disabling as many drivers as possible.

theheyes · 17 Oct 2012 at 16:40

I've used disk2vhd on 2003 server boxes before with great success. Be worth checking if 2000 is supported. That way you could simply run it in a vm.

lurkio · 17 Oct 2012 at 21:28

yeah I had to do something similar in my olde job

transfer a program that was on an NT4 machine onto a win 7 machine with totally different hardware

basic principle is to move all files needed by the prog (including dlls that may need to be registered)
and extract and then merge in any registry keys used by the program

regmon / procmon will help with the reg / file stuff stuff

dependancy walker 2.1 will help with what dlls it is loading

Madmrcopper · 18 Oct 2012 at 11:39

Best thing would be to take a virtual snapshot of the machine and load it into your desired virtual machine product. All the major ones provide free tools and software for this.

KompuKare · 18 Oct 2012 at 11:57

I've never done a Win2K box, but VMWare's Converter doesn't currently list Win2K support.
VMware vCenter Converter™

However, a quick google does find people who have successfully converted Win2K machines for instance:
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1138912

Oh, there is an alternative way to do this: create a virtual machine for Win2K and use Ghost to copy the HDD image to the virtual disk. That may work but if it doesn't you can use something like Acronis Universal Copy to make an image of that virtual disk and restore it. Universal Copy should be able to strip out any hardware specific parts (the Windows HAL etc.) and then when you restore you should get a generic Win2K machine.

However, virtualising the whole machine is going to be awkward and possibly not necessary. I would start by just grabbing the program's folders, try to see where it writes any .INIs or registry entries and see if just copying the program will do the job.

LizardKing · 18 Oct 2012 at 12:25

You need an older version of VMware converter to convert 2k. version 4.0 irc.
Done it plenty of times with older machines and some are still in use today, unfortunately!