captain_koloth wrote on 2021-03-19, 15:07:

I had this vision of installing a bunch of old Windows NT and OS/2 versions on a PII PC as a sort of multi-boot "tour of unusual operating systems" machine. Long story short: terrible idea. None of the old OS/2 or Win NT versions are compatible with even 1997 era hardware for install (at least not this 1997-era hardware). I do have all of these installed in PCEm VMs. Does anyone have experience with flashing PCEm img HDDs to an SD and then using those via an SD-to-IDE setup? I know HOW to do it so I'm not asking technically how it would be done, and there's lots of information about doing this with "normal" OSs like Win 98 and DOS, my question is whether anyone has tried it with these "weirder" OSs or whether I'll just get a thousand new, different errors when I try to boot.

Make sure you do it with the SD card inserted into the adapter you’ll be using and not directly to just the SD card. Besides driver issues you can run win setup and get things working pretty fast. It’s best to format the disk using the boot disk, copy the files over then restart the installation of whatever you want to try and the putting that fresh install into your machine. I’ve been messing around with this same sort of thing myself and this has been the most functional method. I would use VBox as I haven’t had good experiences trying something similar with PCem. I pasted a link below that has information on directly mounting your IDE to SD adapter in vbox with raw disk access. Make sure that you also offline the disk and then turn off read only using disk part

Edit:For reference the machines I’ve been doing this with are a Katmai P3 board, a Compaq 486 and a pentium packard bell legend

http://theinstructionlimit.com/installing-ms- … -to-ide-adapter