We have a customer with an older machine using an IDE hard drive and running a half-dozen Virtual PCs under Windows XP, with each of the Virtual PCs being a Windows XP. Basically, there's a Windows XP machine in their central office, and they run Virtual PC on it to allow them to log into the Virtual PC and submit information to their central server as if they were at one of their remote stores, one Virtual PC for each remote store. We weren't the ones who originally set all this up, and have no experience with Virtual PC except having logged into an existing one a time or two.
The machine is very sluggish (not surprising with the load it's carrying and its age and the fact that it has less than 1GB of RAM) and they're interested in upgrading to a new machine. However, if they get a current machine, it's likely to have SATA hard drives instead. It's bad enough trying to move Windows XP to a new system by itself. But we're talking about moving a Windows XP containing multiple XP Virtual PCs to a totally new set of hardware, possibly even a new hard drive, all at once. Is this even remotely possible?
Suppose they installed a fresh copy of Windows XP on the new system, and a fresh copy of Virtual PC. Can the VPC images be transfered over somehow to the new computer, without the Windows XP in each Virtual PC having a nervous breakdown over suddenly finding itself on new hardware?
Would either of these options work, or are they going to have to resign themselves to just installing everything (including setting up new Virtual PCs) from scratch on a new computer and trying to get the data off over the network? And if it's the latter, what's the best way of transfering data from a Virtual PC image on one machine to a Virtual PC image on another machine? Can two VPCs see each other over network if you log into a VPC on each computer?
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