WTF I am up to

I was ask to see if I could replace a windows98 and a windows NT4 server.

Sounds simple enough, have him purchace a new server to install EXi on it and P2V the old machines into it.

Well that didn't go the way I planned. I planned to invest about 4 hours to this project, that quickly trippled with reseach and actual work.

First of the server that I recomened him to get built in raid controler didn't work with vmware. No matter what I tried from disableing it to recreateing the raids EXi would not see the raid. Flashing the BIOS didn't work. The work around was to wait until the next morning and purchace a cheep sata raid controler card. After installing the card I was able to install the O/S and then the real fun started.

VMware states it can p2v windowsNT with sp6 installed, use the free converter software and install it on the host machine, push it to the VM server and hurry up and wait.

Finding SP6 was a bitch to say the least. I had to use torrents to find it. Sketchy at best and since that server was only not mine but a his primary server that had no back of it.

I needed a way to make sure it was backed up somewhere before I started to upgrade his o/s. FreeNAS, installed it on the VMserver, created a SMB share, dumped all sql excel and word documents I could find on it.

SP6 was clean and installed no issue, rebooted the server and started the P2V. Even though the FAQ's stated it could and will work with the converter software, acually running it didn't work! It kept giveing me the error that the software was not compatable with the O/S.

That was the FUCK! moment, WTF to do now!

Back to searching the web for ideas. Norton Ghost9 stated it could create a flat file of nt4 and then use the converter to turn the file into a vmx file. Well give it a try I thought. Waisted time, but a good start to a clue.

Rebuilding a NT4 server on the EXi box is not the solution. but createing a NT4 workspace is. Build a bart disk with ghost8 and the nic drivers for that computer! Brillaint.

It took a bit of time to make the bart disk, good thing I had an old xp disk in my library. Found a copy of ghost on the net. Confiuged it into Bart and make the iso.
burned it to disk and uploaded it to the VMserver.

After booting into the newly created bart disk on the old NT server box, I ghosted it the SMB server on Freenas.

Created a NT4 workspace on the VMserver and used and configured it to boot from the bart iso. Loaded the VM nic drivers, mapped a drive to the SMB server and loaded ghost.
It fucking work!. Ghost was able to create a clone of the server, and after a reboot of the virtual machine, NT4 loaded up.

the only pain I had after that with that box was I had to manually install the VM Nic drivers. No biggie.

Now repeat the same proccess with the windows98 computer.

It wasn't as easy as the nt4 machine. The box was somewhat broken when I recived it. The video card's drivers was corrupted, and other issues that take to long to mention.

The ghosting worked but every time booting into the vm 98 machine, I would get an endless loop of PCI to PCI bridge install.
Back to WTF to do now!

I came to the conclusion that I am completely and utterly fucked! Nothing I can do to recover from it. Backup plan is to replace the dieing hard drive and keep the physical machine online and pray it doesn't die. I also don't give up so easy but i know that I should prepair for the worse.

I already have a back up the machine via Ghost on the so I can mess around with the vm win98 box. Booting it into safemode (so old skewl), I removed all the duplicated drivers in the device driver, disabled the PCI bridge rebooted and still had the same PCI bridge issue.

Back in safe mode, found the install disks (yep it was installed back floppy) . Ran the setup and rebooted again, reinstalled the O/S over the old one. Rebooted and it work.

I will never willing take on a project like this again.

This is where I get on my soapbox and comment about what I am working on