Installing Windows Vista Beta 1 under Virtual
PC is not an immediate task and today the Virtual PC Team has explained
the main
problems, resumable as follow:
- Windows Vista Beta 1 does not correctly identify the virtual hard disk
when it is not partitioned. To handle this you should start the installation,
get to the hard disk partitioning page, partition and format your virtual hard
disk, and then reboot the virtual machine.
- Windows Vista Beta 1 does not have drivers for the VPC emulated
video card, SCSI adapter and sound card. The video and SCSI drivers are
installed as part of the Virtual Machine Additions, but there's no way to use
the sound card.
- The currently shipping Virtual Machine Additions will install on Windows
Vista Beta 1 but they do no contain performance enhancements for Windows Vista
Beta 1.
- Virtual PC does not support the use of ISO images over 2.2GB in size
(Virtual Server 2005 SP1 beta does), so if you are using Virtual PC
you will either need to burn a physical DVD to install Windows Vista Beta 1,
or use a virtual CD program on your host computer.
To solve the installation problems I recommend the instructions given me by
Bart De Smet:
- Download and unzip the VCD ISO tool to mount
the .iso file to a drive letter on the host operating system. Read the
readme.txt file for instructions on how to use it. Assume the mounted drive
letter is Z:.
- Start Virtual PC 2004 and create a new virtual machine with a new virtual
harddisk.
- Now launch your virtual machine and choose CD, Use Physical Drive Z:.
- After the BIOS' POST phase, you should see the Longhorn PE coming up (mini
version on Windows Vista core to execute the setup in). PE stands for
Preinstallation Environment.
- Click through the setup till you reach the page where the installation
partition can be chosen (pass through the product key entry, EULA accept and
installation type choice). You'll see the following message: "The
partition you selected is not available for installation. Please reboot your
computer and verify that the disk is enabled in your computer's BIOS
settings". You can click next and the disk is marked as "Unavailable".
Perform the following steps:
- Click 'New' to create a new partition on the virtual harddisk. Choose
the maximum size available (that's the full disk space).
- Press SHIFT-F10 to enter the command line.
- Execute format c: /fs:ntfs /q to perform
a quick NTFS format of the volume. Note: for the ':' symbol, use ALT-58 if
you don't have the right keyboard layout; use ALT-47 for the '/'
symbol.
- Reboot the machine (try the shutdown /r
command or do a hard reset).
- Possibly you can receive a BSoD for ntfs.sys when launching setup again;
rebooting should fix this issue.
- Next time you reach the installation partition choice step, the message
mentioned in the previous step should be gone and you should be able to
proceed.
I hope that this collection of tricks can help who wants to try this type of
installation...
Now I want to launch a request to the Virtual PC Team: on your blog
you say that "We are currently investigating releasing updated beta
Additions for Windows Vista Beta 1". This sounds good, but if you plan to
do this, why not planning also to improve the VPC device emulation?
I think that we can't work well with Vista under a virtual machine that uses
an ISA Sound Blaster 16 compatible sound card and (expecially) a poor
graphic card. How can we test the power of the new user interface? And the 3D
features? Guys, please work on this... 