The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Kennyw88 on 2024-08-10 14:58:56.
Aside form the crap I decide to horde from the outside world, I've horded every single line of code I ever wrote in my professional life. This is a shot in the dark void of the cosmos, but here goes. . . .
I'm a former engineer (mainly automation). A system I once spent a chunk of my life on was Siemens Simadyn-D and the software ran on SCO Openserver 3.2 (I think) as this was a few moons ago. It's called P32.Struc. One of the last things I did before leaving that project was to image the HDD of the 386 machine that ran the software we used to modify/program the SimD PLCs (this is in addition to all the actual code). I have a need to virtualize this image, but I can't find anything capable of understanding this backup and I can't recall what it was that I used to image the drive in this machine, but it could have been the DOS program Ghost or perhaps even a commercial program called Drive Image (4 or 5) that I would have bought during the project.
At some point in the past, I purchased and tried VMware, but it failed to see the ghost/DI image as a valid HDD image file and/or the virtualized image would not boot. The free conversion tool that was offered by VMware did not work. I recall that I went on a rampage getting all the various versions of SCO Openserver that I could find, but I was never successful in getting them to install. I do have the drive image ISOs, the backup file, code files, P32Struc installer, drivers - basically, every damn thing I should need to create a fully functional Struc Programing Station (sans some HW such as the P16/P32 programmer and the magneto optical backup drive) - but I couldn't get it to work on my last attempt.
For those that know SCO, it's a massive PIA and it's very sensitive to the HW. I really don't want to de-evolve down to searching eBay for a functional 386 machine with a SCSI HDD just to fail again. I'm hoping, perhaps beyond hope, that one of you has experience with virtualizing very old HDD images and, dare I hope, someone who has experience with SCO Openserver. I think my best chance is to get SCO running virtually and then fight my best fight to get Siemens' software to install and run on it.
Thanks in advance and thanks to the non-automation people who suffered thru my dribble in a concerted effort to understand what I need.