This evening I have reactivated my first and so much loved mobile computer as a virtual machine. Impressive how easy this is with some tools and #VirtualBox. It's a HP omnibook xe4500 
and I got it from my parents around 2003. It is a really amazing machine and I have learned a lot about Linux and OpenSource with it and spent really A LOT of time with it! I have compiled and experienced so many and some of the most amazing free and opensource software on this machine. It never had any failures, very solid and I really treated it bad and used it very intensively. Working every day on it for programming, entertainment, communication, studying, gaming, running 29days 8h8min with Linux 2.6.12-rc2 since Fri May 13 16:11:41 2005, transport in a bag while running, I took it two years to Norway and traveling to Indonesia and Norway, completely disassembled and setting it together again several times, etc. Only the battery died after some years and it only survived few minutes, but then the final death was a problem with the power jack that got more and more unreliable. 
Damn I really need to disassemble it completely again and fix that! There must be a shrine in our new house for it. 
The only bad thing about this notebook was that the fan was terrible loud.
Some quick notes how to recover an old PC, for sure I will need this again:
Plug the HDD into an external USB connector for ATA and SATA HDDs.
$ ddrescue /dev/sdX /tmp/hp.img /tmp/hp_ddrescue.log
No read error at all after 10years! IBM Travelstar (Model: IC25N030ATCS04-0) 30GB from JUN-02. Man I have already recovered so many HDDs and machines that did not get treated that hard over such a long time.
$ VBoxManage convertfromraw /tmp/hp.img /opt/VirtualBoxHDDs/hd.vdi --format VDI --variant Standard
Create a new virtual machine and use this VDI HDD and power it up. That's it basically.
It boots directly into runlevel 4 after run fsck after 629 days without being checked. Only had to delete my xorg.conf that I put together in many sleepless nights and I had my full desktop back. #Slackware 12.2 and the great #KDE 3.5.10 and my desktop was loaded with a nice green KDE wallpaper. It presented me all my open browser tabs, konsole and kwrite sessions and even opened eMails again that I was still writing! I love this feature from KDE!!! And I got greated from hundreds of reminders from KOrganizer.
There is still bit work left, like cleaning up some omnibook kernel modules and hdparm settings, changing the network and sound drivers, installing the VirtualBox guest additions, but that should be no big deal anymore.
Categories: nostalgia , HOWTO
