Slaughter's Blog: A Physically Virtual Christmas [CrazedSanity.com]

Update: I wrote this in two parts, and found it to be quite disjointed after reading it myself. I have revised it.

The Craptasmic Craptasm

Being a geek, I've seen many outdated PC's. WIndows 98, Windows 95, even (*gasp*) Windows 3.11. Maybe it holds vital tax records from the days of yore, some mystical program that won't run on anything but that computer--the damnable floppy was dropped onto a subwoofer, and it was apparently the only copy in existence--or its just used for the kids.

In my case it was the latter, and my duty--and point of this story--was to replace it with something more useful.

The old system was an HP 233Mhz craptasm with a whopping 190 megs of RAM and a whole 4 gig hard drive (~91% full mind you). It had a sound card, even USB with an external DVD drive, and a terrible old monitor that was lucky to be 12" (I think the viewable area was probably more along the lines of 8").

I've got all kinds of spare stuff laying around: hard drives, cases, CD drives, sound cards... everything needed to build a computer. Not a fast one by today's standards, but definitely better quality than the one in use.

A Plan Is Formulated...

All of my little brothers and sisters have used Linux on my laptop, and they don't mind it. In fact, sometimes they've indicated that they like it better than... er... that other operating system. So building a Linux system would be worthwhile... but they probably still want to be able to play their games on Windows. I'd love to say that I could get them all to play directly under Linux, but that's a load of turd. And I am definitely not installing Windows on anything if I can help it. I don't do Windows.

And thus my journey to build a "new" computer for them begins.

Execution of the Plan... Sorda.

At this point, I have decided to build them a new computer with Linux. To ensure they can still play their games and such, I will use some geek fairy-dust and make their Windows computer into a virtual machine. This way, they can fire up the computer and play games, and if they want to play something in Windows, they can just start their virtual computer. Click a button and watch Windows load in--ironically--another window.

Well, I've got an old computer case from my wife's old Gateway desktop system. It doesn't have a hard drive, but it has pretty much everything else--video, sound, network, cdrom, power--so I've got most of it covered. An old Compaq laying around holds the hard drive, and a 20 gig at that (5 times more space than their current drive). Ubuntu Linux will be the core system, which will require a fair amount of space, especially after installing all the games they need.

So what is left besides putting it together, you ask? Well, there's that small issue of making their computer virtual. And that's supposed to be the easy part...

The Data, Boss, The DATA!

With the computer mostly taken care of, it is time to get a copy of their hard drive. I've got all kinds of the fairy dust needed to get an image of the drive (an exact duplicate of their data), but getting to it is a beast. As I said before, it was a big pile of craptasmic craptasm with a slight smell of poop. Yeah, it was that friggin' awesome.

Being an old machine, I was lucky enough for it to have a USB port. After convincing the family to abandon their computer room, I dropped a bootable Linux disc in the drive and fired it up... after waiting a full five minutes beyond my available patience threshold, I was greeted with a blank screen. No disc activity. Lights on the keyboard did nothing. "Oh, crap," I said under my breath.

So I come back with the new computer. With my Cloak of PC Hiding +5, I stealthily sneaked (snuck?) the new system in. Minutes and minutes of ripping things apart and moving cords later, I have both drives in the new computer. Boot the new computer with the same bootable CD and I'm blessedly at the screen of Linux-filled geekdom. Type command, watch data fly from the old drive to the new drive. Waiting... waiting... waiting... still not done? Waiting... waiting... waiting... WTF? My five minutes of patience expended, I fire up my laptop and start playing an intoxicating game of Mah Jong. For two hours.

Input/Output Error while...

"What?!?" Take my Bond-like watch from ThinkGeek.com off, plug into the system, start copying to my watch. Obviously, the drive I used was bad. Waiting... waiting... waiting... my limited patience once again expired, I pulled up another game. About two more hours later, I get another input/output error.

Bring Craptasm home, install Ubuntu 8.10 on "new" computer with bigger hard drive. Install better data recovery tool, dd_rescue, to pull data from the drive. About 45 minutes later, it completed. The real kicker? This image was just about 1 megabyte bigger than the previous (broken) image. Finally, the data!

I Don't Do Windows

I installed a magical piece of virtualization software, VMware Player, gave the machine two hard drives, and booted it from a Linux bootable disc. Copy data to secondary drive from the real computer to a file on the secondary drive of the virtual computer (which now I realize was a time-waisting maneuver). Wait for an hour. Copy data from secodary drive directly to the primary drive. Wait for an hour. Done!

Now it was time to get the virtual machine running... and if any of you have tried to move a hard drive with Windows from an old computer to a new one (or even just a different one), you'll know just how painful of a process I was getting myself into.

Boot up the virtual machine without the cd, after having deleted the second virtual drive (which was no longer needed). For the first time in a very long time, I was actually happy to see the Windows logo appear. Sadly, it was quickly followed by what seemed like a hundred "New Hardware Found" screens.

Yes, install the new hardware... search the computer for it... finish...

About an hour later (is that all?), it asked to reboot, so I did. Windows screen, fifty more "New Hardware Found" screens, another reboot. The same fifty "New Hardware Found" screens for a "PCI PCI-to-PCI Bridge" (that's a lot of PCI)... so I Googled for an hour to find a dozen things that didn't work, before I finally got something that worked: by disabling something in the virtual machine's config (okay, several somethings). Reboot. Finally, a desktop!

I went through and found some drivers for the old hardware so sound and display worked properly. I removed about a half-dozen programs that were no longer needed, and everything seemed to work just fine. I also went through and did a few updates to the OS and installed a couple of games the kids had played on my laptop. Things were finally coming together.

Special Wrappings, and Putting Frankenstein Back Together

In order to have all the kids feel special, I decided to take the computer apart and put four pieces into separately wrapped gifts. I wrapped (well, okay, my wife wrapped) the hard drive, video card, power supply, and CDROM drive into four separate boxes, one for each kid. The tower itself was then wrapped in a bunch of different bits of wrapping paper and some cardboard around the edges to keep them from destroying the paper.

Come Christmas day, the kids opened their presents one at a time. Each gave a dumbfounded look, though I could see my oldest little brother already had the solution. I had them open the largest present together, revealing the computer dubbed "Frankenstein".

Afterward I helped my (eldest) little brother piece the whole beast together. I told him what to do at each step so he got more familiar with working on computers--he had told me he wanted to know the stuff I did, so I fugured it was a good opportunity. We spent an hour putting the thing together, and I taught him all about old computers and cabling, and we had a blast.

Posted by Slaughter @ 10:24 PM [permalink]