Virtualise a physical Windows 95 PC

Solution 1:

First you say this:

Would ripping out the drive and putting it in an external USB caddy in order to use Disk2VHD from my Windows 7 PC work?

Well, “…ripping out the drive and putting it in an external USB caddy…” would definitely work as a way of you accessing the raw data on the hard drive itself. I recommend that before you toss the proverbial system “bathwater” out, save that hard drive “baby” since at the end of the day the physical system itself is not the “time capsule” itself but rather the data stored on the hard drive is the real data prize; everything else is discardable. The Disk2VHD idea most likely won’t work. Details below.

My research suggests that this method has problems with the VM not being able to locate the system disks.

True. You might not be able to use that hard drive as a bootable OS drive for a Virtual Machine. But then the question presents itself: While the hard drive is a “time capsule” you want to preserve, what exactly do you want to do with it? Are there programs you want to run? Or are their files you want to access?

9 times out of 10, the later is the case: The data and files stored on the drive are what’s important. You will not care about the old OS on a system but rather need access to the files on the system. If that is the case, there is no need to create a bootable system in a VM but basically just take the drive, place it in an external USB case and there you go.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Get the Right Connection: If this is truly a Windows 95 PC, then the drive would most likely be a PATA/IDE/ATA drive. So if you get an external enclosure, you need to make sure you can connect a PATA/IDE/ATA drive to it. Instead of a full enclosure, I would recommend that you get something like this USB 3.0 universal drive adapter which has connections for SATA as well as PATA/IDE/ATA connections. That adapter is not a permanent solution, but a good tool to help you access data from various hardware with different data connections.

• Only Mount the Drive for Backup: If you consider the contents of that drive to be valuable, the very first thing you can/should do when you are able to mount it is to create an copy of the drive in some way. Either creating an image of the disk itself or a straight copy of contents. Given the vintage of the machine and drive—and the size of storage that was common back then—I believe you would even be able to copy the contents to a CD-R or DVD-R. Or maybe even a USB flash drive. But in general, if the drive is older than 10 years old it’s best if you only mount the drive to copy the contents off of it. Because even if the drive seems to work well, you never know if it will suddenly “give up the ghost” and die on you.

Solution 2:

You can convert a physical machine to a VMware virtual machine using their tool. The software will "generify" the hardware components to be compatible with the virtual machine.

Here's a YouTube video on how to convert physical to virtual workstation.