How to virtualize an existing OS2 operating system?

Question

I was looking into virtualizing OS2. I know it's a little tricky to virtualize OS2 in the first place, but I was wondering If it were possible to virtualize an existing OS2? I was going to use Virtual box. I duplicated the hard drive from an OS2 machine, and I wanted to know if it was possible to make it a virtual image? so that I could run it on another PC. OR if that is not possible, could I just create a virtual OS2 on a PC FIRST, Then move all installed software and files from the physical drive to the virtual OS? thank you.

Answer 1

If you can take the OS2 hard drive and extract it as an image (via dd or equivalent), you should be able to write that image to a VHD or other VirtualBox virtual filesystem. However, since the VHD isn't simply the raw extract that you would get from dd, you might need to mount the target filesystem on a Linux VM first, transfer the raw OS2 image to that VM, then dd it out to the VHD. You should then be able to create a new virtual machine that has that VHD as the primary drive and boot from that.

The only problem, naturally, is that the underlying "hardware" of virtual machine would probably be different from what your source OS2 machine was. Chipset incompatibilities, graphics card, etc. However, I think that OS2 would fail over to some default modes at least on the graphics front.

In other words:

1. dd out the OS2 hard drive to a raw .img file.
2. Create a VHD and mount it on a Linux VM.
3. dd the .img file to the first partition of the new VHD.
4. Create a new VM configuration for OS2 and assign the VHD you created as the primary hard drive.
5. Boot new OS2 VM and cross fingers.