If you have been following I recently did some major damage to my laptop. I will be getting a new desktop before long and figured I would just virtualize my laptop and work on it that way instead of remote desktop (which still works fine). Being that my trusty home server backs up all of my computers nightly I decided what a novel idea to just use a Windows Home Server image and restore to a VM(geek speak for virtual machine) instead of a physical computer.
So I booted from my Windows Home Server pc restore ISO (image of a cd) and got ready to go but suddenly realized the VM had no access to my network. It turns out that the restore cd didn’t have drivers for an antiquated AMD network card, which happens to be the network card that VMware uses to virtualize a network card. Off I went to the net to find some program to make a floppy disk image. I discovered WinImage, which has a fully functioning trial and was able to burn a floppy image of the drivers that I got from AMD. Once this whole process was done I was able to mount the floppy image to my VM and told the restore program to scan the "floppy" drive for drivers for the network card. And Viola, the system now has access to the home network, and thus my home server.
The Windows Home Server was able to then restore my system in about 15 minutes. Using this little technique I was able to turn my laptop into a virtual machine and now it can be run from my current desktop. Even further I am able to backup the VM to the home server so at some later date I can just restore it back to my laptop when and if I decide to fix it.
What’s up with the laptop now? Is it fixed yet or what? Anyway thats a nice thinking to virtualize your laptop and work from it, now commenting on floppy disks for me they’re dead lol I still do have them but I am sure whether my floppy drive works or not, now our volume range has gone so up that 1.44mb that was once very was considered very spacious now it’s nothing! Before, we used to boot from floppy disk to install Windows from an unbootable CD and now we can install whole Windows from one usb drive hehe!