MS Virtual PC

[The Borg]

Hi all,

After some troubles with getting all my hardware to work with my software, I have decided to try 'virtualisation' or whatever the correct term would be.

I saw MS had Virtual PC 2007 so I have downloaded it and installed it. I set up the environment for an OS, but cannot get one installed. It keeps on saying non-boot (like usual when a disk has no OS) but only goes to what appearst to be a PXE network boot attempt. Also, looks like it wants to boot from a floppy at other times.

How do I get it to install from a CD?

Any help please?

 

[Snapster]

They've changed it slightly from previous virtual pc but yes, it tries a PXE network boot. What you have to do is click "Start" on the Virtual PC 2007 Console and then select "CD," then "Use Physical Disk X" where "X" represents the drive letter of your CD or DVD. Make sure a bootable operating system install disk is in the drive. To install from an image, select "CD," then "Capture ISO Image" and select the image from the file system. To install from a floppy disk, select "Floppy," then "Capture Floppy Disk Image" Install the operating system according to its normal process.

short guide to help

 

[mc866]

FWIW this may not help much but I tried Virtual PC and didn't have much luck especially with different versions of linux, I've had much better luck with Sun's VirtualBox.

 

[The Borg]

Finally got it working. Managed to get a boot floppy to work then it was ok. Very nice actaully. Now to just get it to read properly from CD's.

The reason I am using a virtual machine some of my software does not play nice with XP-64, so set up a Win 2000 VM and loading the software through there.

It is quite amazing how the VM interacts - just like a standalone PC - network, hardware, sound.

 

[Chiropteran]

Originally posted by: mc866
FWIW this may not help much but I tried Virtual PC and didn't have much luck especially with different versions of linux, I've had much better luck with Sun's VirtualBox.

This is true.

I've tried all 3, each has advantages and disadvantages.

Virtual PC seems to be great if you just want to run a virtual windows installation, but won't work at all with many flavors of linux and even if you could get it working I wouldn't trust it to be reliable.

VMware Server (free product) seems to play nice with windows and linux virtual machines, but if you use Vista 64 as your host it's basically unusable because it doesn't have signed drivers for the virtual hardware.

Virtualbox seems to be the best of both worlds, it runs windows and linux guests just fine and it's drivers are signed so they will work without issue on Vista 64. The one drawback is that Virtualbox can't run a 64bit guest yet, but that is a limitation I can live with. As a cool bonus, you can virtualize your sound card too, I'm not sure if VMware or Virtual PC offer this feature.