I have a program that I used for years on my old computer with Vista OS. That computer died (motherboard failure) and was replaced with a computer running Windows 8.1.

The old program is not compatible with Windows 8.1. It won't install and the program vendor says it is not compatible.

Unfortunately, the program (an architectural CAD program) has generated some files that I have spent hundreds of hours creating, and I don't wish to lose that work. The new 8.1 version of the program is Windows 8.x compatible, but saves the work in a new format, and is not backwards compatible with the old format. There is no known application that can read the old format and save or convert it to the new format.

Would it be feasible to set my new computer up with a dual-boot capability, with 8.1 as the principal OS but having the ability to boot in Vista? Could I then install the old program and work with my old files? That means I have to partition my C:> drive, right? If it doesn't work out, can I "un-partition" it later? Do I have to have all the files (program file, libraries, data files, etc.) in the Vista partition to access them?

As you might surmise, this is a scary idea to me, and I don't know what the risks and the rewards might actually be.

tanstaafl.

Windows 8.1 comes with Hyper-V, MS vistulization product, and with this you will be able to run Viata within a virtual machine on top of but isolated from Windows 8.1

This pdf http://aztcs.org/meeting_notes/winhardsig/virtualmachines/Hyper-V/Hyper-V.pdf should clear things up for you.

In addition to Hyper-V, there is also VMWare and VirtualBox.

All three of them will allow you to install an older version of Windows into a virtual environment which you can then run as if it were the real thing.

It will run slightly slower than if it were running natively, but for the product in question, you won't necessarily notice a difference.

The only things I'd want to run in VMs are certain old games that don't play successfully with Win 8.1, but the VMs still don't support 3D cards very well so they're not really useful to me for that purpose yet, at least, not for the specific games I want to virtualize.

Your app though, should run fine in any of those 3.

Tony, what games are you trying to virtualize?

The most troublesome one at the moment is Populous: The Beginning. Specifically, the DirectX version.

The game has two EXE files:

There is a software-rendered version which works fine on Win8, PopTB.EXE.

The one I want to work is D3DPopTB.exe, which crashes every time with a page fault of some kind. I'm pretty sure the crash is due to it using DirectX 7, which just doesn't work on Win8. I seem to recall the page fault is in the D3D libraries somewhere.

I've been reading through forums on Populous Reincarnated and GOG.com, and everyone's solution there seems to be to just run the software-rendered version. Which is not what I want. Though it's what I'm doing for now because I have no other choice.

Neither VirtualBox nor VMWare can run this thing well in Direct3D mode. I think I got one of them to sorta kinda do it at one point, after a ton of tweaking and secret tricks and installing special drivers and editing the VM config files, but it was a slideshow when it ran, even while slamming my CPU/Video to 100%. I tried a ton of workarounds and config tweaks based on all the weird tweaks and things found in message boards and FAQs and howtows on the net, and none of them got it running satisfactorily in the VMs.

I had originally been wanting to do the same kinda thing with Homeworld, but then they came out with Homeworld: Remastered and I just bought that, and it's pretty good.

Most of my TRULY older games were in DOS and so run great under DOSBox with a bit of tweaking.

+1 to a Virtual machine. Legally you will need another licence but that's no different to a dual boot. Much easier to use. You can even suspend it with all your applications open like hibernating the host machine and just resume it when necessary.

Perhaps the compatibility mode options might work (right click on the .exe and then "Compatibility" tab? I've not used them much but they might get you over the line. That's in Windows 7. I presume 8/8.1 has similar options?

If it runs on Vista I'm a little surprised it won't on Windows 8.

Doug, was your Windows Vista 32 bits? If so, that could explain the incompatibility of this specific .EXE with your new 64bits Windows 8.1 .

Yes. And yes.

tanstaafl.

I shouldn't need another license... the old program is bought and paid for, and at present is not installed on any computer that I own.

Nope. Been there, done that. The installer won't do the installation, quits with a "InstallShield 1628 Failed to complete installation" error.

Oddly enough, the very first time I tried to install the program on the new computer, it did install and sort of run. The display was all strange, showed everything in wireframe instead of rendered, so I figured the install was corrupt, deleted the installation and re-installed. Except it never, ever would reinstall again.

The program vendor has said that it won't work in Windows 8.

The learning curve for the old program was horrible, and the new version is enough different I'd have to start all over again. I'd prefer to stay with the old one if I can.

tanstaafl.

He meant a licence for Windows Vista, not a licence for the problem program.

Ah! Of course.

I also have my original paid-for Vista installation disks. I'll probably have to convince Microsoft that my Vista is not currently installed on an existing computer, and that this is a legitimate installation, but I understand that can be done.

tanstaafl.

Yeah. It's easy to do. If you haven't activated that copy on more than one machine in the past, it will probably activate again with no questions asked. If not, a 5 minute phone call will take care of it.

Virtualization is definitely the way to go here and in case it isn't clear, it is fairly straight forward to achieve. It would go something like this with Virtual Box (which is free and easy to use):

- download/install VBox http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.26/VirtualBox-4.3.26-98988-Win.exe
- put your first Vista CD/DVD in your drive
- open VBox and press the button to create a new virtual machine (there is a wizard step-by-step process that takes you through the next few steps)
- when asked, tell it that you want to use Vista 32 bit as the guest operating system
- pick a level of memory to assign to the virtual machine
- choose to create a new virtual hard disk, pick a size for it (you have the option for a fixed size file that it stores the VHD in or a dynamic one, pick the dynamic option, that way the file will only grow as you add data to the virtual machine)
- press "Start" to boot the virtual machine
- VBox will ask you which drive you want boot from, pick the one with your Vista disk

After that, you are just in a normal Vista install.

Is this a reversible process? That is, if (when, actually...) I no longer need the ability to have a VM, can I easily revert back to the original configuration? Is the VM only taking up memory and disk space while actually in use?

tanstaafl.

It only uses memory when the VM is running, as soon as you shut it down (or pause* it) it frees up that memory.

It will continue to use the disk space though, otherwise you'd need to install Vista etc on it every time you used it. By picking a dynamic VHD you minimise the space it uses.

For example if you ask it to create a 50GB dynamic VHD, initially the disk space used will be only a few MBs at most. As you write to the VHD (by installing Vista on to it) the dynamic VHD will grow to store the data written (but to the copy of Vista running within the VM the disk will always appear to be 50GB in size).

So if say your Vista install takes 15GB, that is how much space your dynamically sized VHD will consume.

* if you pause the VM, rather than shutting Vista down, it will use a bit of extra disk space while paused, as VBox saves the active contents of the RAM of the VM to disk when you pause it (with the benefit that when you start the VM again it starts up in the same state when you paused it, just like if you had hibernated from within Windows on a physical machine)

Another great thing about virtualisation rather than dual boot is portability. You can take your virtual machine with your Vista setup and copy it across to any other PC at any time and run it there. Great when it comes time to move to a new PC in the future.

You even have portability between platforms. I have a WinXP VM set up just how I want it for my CD ripping (set it up years ago with dBPoweramp et al). It was originally created in VBox on a Windows Vista host machine, since the it has run on various different Windows host, a couple of OSX hosts and it now runs on my Linux server.

So if I uninstall the VM program everything goes back to the way it was? Disk space, RAM, etc?

I ask because my C:> drive is limited capacity (an SSD) and while there is enough room on it for a second operating system, it would be pushing it a bit. Can I install the VM program and virtual OS on my D:> drive instead? There's 600+ GB free on that one.

tanstaafl.

Yep, you can put them wherever you want. Here's 4 I have just sitting somewhere in my Documents folder on my Mac. I can just move that file anywhere, double click it, and VMWare will fire up just fine. virtualBox pretty much works the same way.

(Technically these are all folders, and they contain a file to represent the virtual hard disk, log files, some setting files, and a RAM snapshot if it was suspended. On OS X, VMWare chose to make the folder into a container to make sure people move everything needed at once).

I don't think the VM program its self will take up much space. You can just tell it to create the actual virtual machine on the other drive.

If you install the application on another drive it defeats a little bit of the purpose of having an SSD in the first place

If possible run the VM from the SSD (IMO). The performance gain will be quite significant. However you can run from the secondary drive no problem.

Note that if you use the VM sparingly, you can move it to the SSD, run it and then move it back to the drive with lots of space.

Think of the VM program as something like MS Word or Excel and the VM itself like a very large .docx or .xslx file (in reality they are a folder with a number of files but you get the idea).

Er, .docx and .xlsx files are folders with a number of files. Seriously. Copy one and rename to .zip and open it up.

Yes they are these days. I wasn't thinking of that when drawing the analogy. That's hidden to normal users though.

Whoa. Learn something new every day.

And very easy to remove password locks (well at least some of them). Unzip file, remove password in one of the files and rezip. It doesn't give you the password necessarily since it's not plain text, but you can just remove it.

I believe this is why this feature ended up being baked directly into Windows: https://www.microsoft.com/resources/docu...w.mspx?mfr=true

I'm surprised more apps didn't move towards doing this with their documents. Though with Windows 8 "modern" apps, they also end up being zip files, named .appx: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Packaging_Conventions

Well, as it turns out, apparently I discarded my old Vista installation disks last year after I purchased the new computer with Windows 8.1.

So, I have acquired a Windows 7 installation disk of questionable provenance. If I double-click it in Windows Explorer, it displays an installation screen that would apparently install Windows 7. However, VirtualBox tells me there is "No bootable medium found, system halted." (see screenshot)

In the root directory of the Windows 7 disk there are subdirectories: BOOT, EFI, SOURCES, SUPPORT, and UPGRADE. Additionally, there are files: AUTORUN.INF, BOOTMGR, AND SETUP.EXE.

??

tanstaafl.

You need to configure VirtualBox to see the CD drive as if it were its own.

Virtual machines don't always connect to the resources on your actual computer unless you tell them to. A few of them it does, for example I think the LAN connection is one that VirtualBox enables by default, but otherwise, things like USB devices and CD-ROM drives, by default it doesn't connect to them until you explicitly tell it to do so.

In your screen shot, where it says "Storage", I only see the virtual hard disk, not the CD-ROM drive. That's probably the issue.

Somewhere in the VirtualBox configuration will be a place for it to configure its virtual CD-ROM drive. It will be named something like "Devices" or something like that. And you will select some menu or button with a name similar to "Add Device" or somesuch. Once you've done that and selected that you want to add a CD-ROM to the virtual machine, then, there will be some kind of a choice where you get to choose what to put INTO that CD-ROM drive. You can choose to:

- Tell it to look at an ISO image file, and pretend the contents of that ISO image file are its CD-ROM drive. (an ISO image is like a single-file rip of an entire CD in one file on the hard disk.)

- Or, tell it to look at the computer's actual CD-ROM drive and use that as its CD-ROM drive.

In your case, you want the latter, since, you don't have an ISO image file of that CD, you have the actual CD.

I'm not sure, but also I seem to recall that if you want to use the CD drive in your real operating system (windows 8) then you have to disconnect/deconfigure the virtual machine using it. (The guest OS and the host OS can't use it at the same time). I could be wrong about that part, though, maybe they'll work together just fine.

By the way, if you DO have the CD-rom properly configured in VirtualBox, but it won't boot from your CD, there are a few possibilities:

- The pirated CD you've got might be crap, and wasn't made to be bootable. Bootable CDs have to be made in a special way to be bootable. If the pirates didn't do that step when they pirated the CD, then that's your problem.

- The BIOS of the virtual machine in VirtualBox might not be configured to auto-boot from the CD-ROM drive. You may have to configure that bit just like you would on a real computer. The usual thing, you know? Remember setting the BIOS back in the old days? Where you have to press a certain special key (like DEL or F12 or F2 or somesuch) as the virtual machine boots, then you get into the BIOS and configure which drives can be booted and in what order. Remember?

- You may simply have missed the "Press any key to boot from CD" message that appeared on the screen of the virtual machine when the CD gets read at bootup. It doesn't stay up for long, and if you miss it, it moves on and tries to boot from the hard disk.

I was going to link to the relevant part of the VirtualBox documentation, but it turns out that the documentation is terrible.

So:

- In the VirtualBox Manager window, with the VM stopped, go to Machine / Settings / Storage.

- Under "Storage Tree", next to the listed controller, click the little button that looks like a CD with a "+" on it. It's at the top. Ignore the buttons at the bottom.

- In the dialog that appears, click "Leave Empty". This will add an Empty CD/DVD drive to the VM. Click on it.

- In the "Attributes" pane on the right-hand side, click the little CD icon. It lists "Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file" and "Host drive blah blah blah". Choose the "Host drive".

- Then, go to the "System" panel in the same dialog. On the "Motherboard" tab, there's a "Boot Order" list. Ensure that "CD/DVD" is checked, and that it's at the top.

Note that this is from VirtualBox 4.3.18, running on my Linux box, but it should be more-or-less identical on the Windows version.

OK, I did all that, results are still the same.

Attached is a screen shot with the new configuration. I had to delete and reinstall the VirtualBox program before it would let me get to the part about "...click the little button that looks like a CD with a "+" on it...", everything was pretty much greyed out before I reinstalled.

??

tanstaafl.