Help transporting .vhd and .vmc to Microsoft Virtual PC

[tzza3038]

I am in school for my MCSE and I have brought home virtual files from there on my flash drive. There are two clients and one server files. All three have to be running for me to use them. I double click on "2274C-DEN-SRV1" vmc file and it puts it into the console. From there I click the PC that I want to open and it tells me

"The parent virtual hard disk has been deleted or has been moved from its previous location. Please, select the new location of the parent virtual hard disk"

I click cange and try to select the "2274C-DEN-SRV1" vhd file in the folder that I have all of these store on my desktop. It will not let me. Then it says...
"Virtual PC was not able to create an undo disk.
Please verify that you have sufficient privileges to write to the virtual machine configuration directory, and that the physical hard disk containing your virtual machine configuration is not full. If the virtual machine is attached to a differencing virtual disk, please verify that the virtual hard disk’s parent was not modified without using the differencing virtual hard disk."

What am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance.

 

[Nelviticus]

It sounds like the VHDs are differencing disks. Look up 'creating virtual hard disks' in Help for more details but essentially you can create a parent VHD with the OS setup you want, then one or more child VHDs based on it. The child VHDs just contain details of the changes from the parent. If you want to set a machine back to the original state you just delete the child disk and create another one based on the parent - it's a nice way of letting students do what they want without having to re-build a new VPC image for the next set of students.

However to use a differencing disk you also need access to the parent VHD. If you move the images to a new location and start up the VPC it'll ask you where the parent is - that's what the first message means. If you don't have a copy of the parent VHD you won't be able to use it.

I hope that makes sense, it's hard to explain!

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[SimonDavies]

Look at them as snap shots, without the original parent you won't be able to do anything with them.

Usually the MS training systems use a parent file with a whole load of different vhd files in different stages of the lesson, without the entire library you won't be able to accomplish anything.



Simon

The real world is not about exam scores, it's about ability.