Physical to Virtual: Extending the life of my old IBM T41 laptop

A story of my geeky physical to virtual journey :

I have an old refurbished IBM T41 laptop that for some reason I have taken a particular mindset to.  I keep re-purposing and resuscitating it beyond its useful life.  I have had it for over 6 years.

The LCD screen on it has not worked for the past 3 years, so I had it plugged into an external monitor as a desktop PC.  A 1.6Ghz Pentium M with 1GB memory.  The hard disk is an old 2.5inch Hitachi Travelstar IDE of about 80GB. It also came with a cdrom  player and is running MS XP.  I originally bought it from a co-worker who was reselling refurbished units on the side.

I used it for my own side work but these days it just does not have enough resources to run in a reasonable fashion.  I even ran Linux on it for a while, although reasonably responsive most of my clients used Windows so it was more of an operational inconvenience.  After all is said and done, this laptop has outlasted several other laptop/tablets (although consumer models as opposed to the business model of the T41) I have had from HP or Dell by about 6 times.

In its current incarnation I have it on 24/7 and use it as a networked Media Center PC with XP accessed via a wireless keyboard.   Recently the system has started to crash due to multiple points of failing hardware.

It seems the system board and the hard disk are finally failing.  Not wanting to waste the license and applications I have on the T41, I came up with the idea of again resuscitating the unit even after its physical hardware has upped and gone to the old technology graveyard.  I was going to convert the T41 into a virtual machine that I could run as a guest OS on my other systems!

In order to do this, I looked for a way to do this at minimum cost and impact to the hosting machine.  The simplest path to virtualize the T41 as a host guest was to use a type 2 hypervisor, a virtulization utility that runs on top of an existing OS so I do not have to disrupt any pre-existing OS and application install on my hosting PC.  (As opposed to the type 1 hypervisor that requires dedicated hardware and a bare metal install)

I decided to use Virtualbox, currently a free type 2 from Oracle.  I used Virtualbox since I am familiar with the product, it is simple to install, manage and update.  It is available on MS and Unix platforms.  Currently I see there is more development and support for the type 2 from Virtualbox than the type 2 from VMware.  Virtualbox also supports the VMDK disk image format from VMware, so that if I can image the T41 hard disk to that format it should be usable on either of the available free type 2 Oracle Virtualbox or VMware server hypervisor platforms.

( No I did not forget MS's Virtual PC, I just wanted more cross platform support than they offered.  Always worth it to keep the maximum number of migration paths/options available as long as possible, if you do not need to lock the selection. )

Now on to imaging the T41 hard disk...

Due to the failing T41 system board and hard disk, I decided to remove the hard disk from the T41 and mount it on to another system to work on imaging it, without the instability of a flaky T41 system board interfering with the process.  I mounted the T41 hard drive to my host desktop system via an 2.5" IDE to USB converter.  Basically a small external USB portable hard disk attachment that you can pick up for about $30.

As part of the prep work, I needed to make sure the drive and data was as stable as possible.  Since the drive had crashed a few times already I know there are bad sectors on the drive that needed to be addressed, after running about 5 long and tedious iterations of  chkdsk /r on the T41 hard disk, I finally got a clean run.  So finally after 2 days of running chkdsk's, time to try imaging the T41 hard disk!

I looked at various raw disk imaging tools, the majority of the good free ones requires using a Live Linux boot CD/DVD of some sort and another drive to receive the disk image or backup of the failing T41 hard drive to.  Since I was using a system running Windows Vista to do the prep work on the IBM drive already, I opted to use a windows based disk imaging tool.

Finally being a computer systems engineer pays off  :), I luckily found an old but workable version of Ghost v11 laying around, think it is the version they first added Vista and 32/64 bit compatibility, so I had a copy for evaluation back then.  One interesting thing is that this version also provides VMDK as a disk file format output option in addition to their proprietary GHO format.  This saves any intermediate steps from using proprietary disk image formats and having to restore them to a virtual disk on a host system.

About 6 hours later, (did I mention that the drive was failing  :) a workable VMDK format hard disk image of the T41 hard disk of about 35GB in size!   boohyah!

Now on to creating and booting the T41 guest from the disk image...

Using Virtualbox:

Using VMware:

Fully accessible T41 virtual guest under Virtualbox and VMware server.  All that needs to be done is to do the clean-up and tune-up. Remove/uninstall the old hardware applications/drivers from the previous physical laptop.  Install the respective guest additions for each of the Virtualbox or VMware server installs to provide support for the virtual IO devices.  Adjust additional parameters like video memory/ memory / CPUs / USB devices / CD-DVD access.

So in about a weeks time the ghost of the old IBM T41 lives on as a virtual guest and with the potential to run better and faster if run on a host with more resources that can be allocated to a guest ....   :)