Attaching linked Harddrive

[fmp08]

A newcomer to Virtual PC; I was able to imideately install XP (from CD) on a virtual machine running Vista (not supported). However I did not fare well creating a virtual machine linked to one of my hard drives (instead of CD installation). Following the instructions I created a new .vhd (huge! 22G) and created a new virtual machine linked to it. When starting the VM the system hangs up with absolutely no error message. I tried several times to no avail. The vhd is on a different harddrive, but the vm is on the same hard drive where I want to work with th vm.
Does anyone have a suggestion?
fmp08

 

[Nelviticus]

You shouldn't link to one of your hard drives unless that drive is used for nothing else - the Virtual PC will treat the whole physical disk as if it owns it.

When you say "the system hangs" do you mean the Virtual PC hangs or your actual PC hangs? If it's the virtual PC you may as well just delete it and its .vhd and start again.

What are you trying to achieve?

Nelviticus

 

[fmp08]

Thanks for the quick reply;
I recently bought a new computer with dual core processor and 4MB of RAM running Vista. In the virtual PC I would like to run XP (my old computer OS), but instead of reinstalling all the software, I thought I could convert my old computer hard drive to a virtual drive running on the new computer. This way I was hoping to be able to run some applications on the new computer that are not supported by Vista.
To test my process I installed XP from my CD which works fine.
I followed the Microsoft instructions to create a vhd file from the physical hard drive. When running the new virtual machine connected to this vhd file, the virtual machine starts, you can see the initial screens autodetect... etc., but hangs up with a blank black screen.
I tried to create the vhd file using winimage.exe with the same result.
fmp08

 

[Nelviticus]

Aha! I understand now. I think the problem is that because your virtual machine is a clone of your old PC it has drivers installed for hardware which is now missing and lacks drivers for the (virtual) hardware which is now present.

The solution might be to follow the same procedure you'd use if you wanted to change a PC's motherboard without re-installing XP, which involves doing a 'repair' installation of XP amongst other things. This isn't generally recommended but it is possible, and in your case you don't have anything to lose if you make a backup copy of your .vhd first, or use undo disks. Have a look at some of these links: upgrading a motherboard with Windows XP.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[fmp08]

Thanks; I will try; based on the article referenced my OEM version CD may or may not work.
I can also try to use sysprep to strip the info and try to install; I did try to transfer the XP OS when I got the new computer but was not successfull. I assumed because the new computer has a SATA drive which requires different drivers for the installation. May be for the virtual PC that is not the case, so may be I can make it work.
I will report back.
Thx
Fred