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Running Windows Vista Beta 1 under Virtual PC / Virtual Server

  • Artikel

Running Windows Vista Beta 1 under Virtual PC 2004 SP1 / Virtual Server 2005 SP1 is quite straight forward - but there are a few issues to be aware of:

  1. 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. The second time through Windows Vista Beta 1 will correctly identify the hard disk (now that it is partitioned).
  2. Windows Vista Beta 1 does not have drivers for our emulated video card, SCSI adapter and sound card. The video and SCSI drivers are installed as part of the Virtual Machine Additions - however there is no way to get our sound card to work. The reason for this is because we emulate an ISA Sound Blaster 16 compatible card - and Windows Vista no longer has support for the ISA bus - let alone this card.
  3. While the currently shipping Virtual Machine Additions will install on Windows Vista Beta 1, they do no contain performance enhancements for Windows Vista Beta 1, nor have they been tested on Windows Vista Beta 1. We are currently investigating releasing updated beta Additions for Windows Vista Beta 1 (no promises though :-).
  4. 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.

Cheers,
Ben

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 02, 2005
    "We are currently investigating releasing updated beta Additions for Windows Vista Beta 1"

    Would this new release (if you get to it) enable the DWM / Aero effects on the Vista Beta 1? I guess the current issue seems that Virtual PC/Server emulates a very low end graphics card and Vista does not support that ... now if you can emulate a GeForce 6800 card - that would be cool! ;-)

    - Keeron
  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2005
    Yes, having both the graphics card and sound card being emulated bumped up a few notches would be a welcome change.
  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2005
    When mounting the ISO via Daemon Tools, I had a number of weird install issues and problems and could never get Vista to run successfully... Where as when I burned it to DVD and installed it, I had no problems.

    I've read a couple posts from others having similar problems, with both Daemon and the XP Virtual CD.

    You're mileage may vary, yada, yada, yada...
  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2005
    Hi Keeron,

    No - it will not enable uDWM. That will take a lot more work :-)

    Cheers,
    Ben
  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    Ben,

    Thanks for clearing that up :) I hope you guys can improve the performance of Vista (later builds maybe?) on Virtual PC/Server. Even without the fancy effects, running it on virtual pc has great benifits (specially for developers with the release of WinFX and Longhorn SDKs).

    - Keeron
  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    I tried installing Vista on a clean VPC machine and can't get anywhere with it. Just says to please insert the boot media. DLed the iso from MSDN Downloads and have tried a physical burn as well as the ISO... neither works. Any thoughts?
  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    You need Daemon tools - it allows you to mount a dvd or cd virtually (more than 10 i think). here's some brief steps I did:

    1. Mount the LH Beta 1 ISO to any free drive
    2. Start the LH VPC
    3. As soon as things are initialized, it'll detect the bootable dvd and boot from it - starting the setup.exe
    4. When you click the install option, you'll need to press shift+F10 and format the raw disk (using diskpart).
    5. After that reboot, enter setup again - and install longhorn - er Vista :)

    - Keeron
  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2005
    yeah, hopefully MS realises the benefits of virtual machines, and could have drivers/detection of a virtual environment. It could then choose the optimal configurations etc.
  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2005
    I have tried to install the Longhorn Beta 1 on a clean harddisk in VPC several times. I solved the partition problem, but never the less, every time the installation process stopped at one point or another. Usually the process stopped when the system dialog telling me that Internet Explorer 7 was being configured. After a restart the same dialog was shown and, when given enough time, it worked.
    Now the problem is that VM additions don't work. I've tried many, many times. It seems to work fine until the last tiny bit of the progress bar. Then it stops there for hours. Usually I force it to stop, but last night I left the machine on during the night and in the morning it sayd that it could not access C:Config.Msi. Any suggestions? Please help me!
  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2005
    Keeron, could you please post details for your steps 4 and 5? I'm not familiar with the DISKPART utility... thanks so much!
  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2005
    Kaarew -

    I do not know what could be causing that problem. What sort of system are you running on?

    Travis -

    You should not need to use DiskPart - you just need to reboot after partitioning and formatting the virtual hard disk.

    Cheers,
    Ben
  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2005
    I'm running Windows XP Pro and I just found out that it was running in PAE mode (Physical Address Extension), again. I thought that I got rid of that some time ago. In the past it has caused me a lot of trouble with both VPC and the Pocket PC emulators in VS.
    I have now changed the flags in boot.ini to "/noexecute=AlwaysOff /NOPAE" and it seems to do the trick. PAE mode is gone.
    Now I have started a new installation and it looks ok so far. We'll see. Thanks for quick reply!
  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2005
    Yes! The installation (both Longhorn and VM additions) works fine now. I wish Windows XP could ask me before using this PAE mode. It has caused me days and weeks of trouble. A number of mysterious problems have occured and the reason have been very difficult to track down. Apparently my new CPU have a mechanism to prevent unauthorised code to run (NX bit). But it won't work unless the system is running in PAE mode... OK, I hope this info will be usefull to others.
  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2005
    Well, here's an obvious question (and/or I'm an idiot)...how do you load the virtual machine additions? That option is greyed out from the action menu, and the 'install supplemental drivers' shortcut on the desktop tells me it doesn't have drivers for me.

    Is there another way of doing it or am I SOL?
  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2005
    I'm attempting to install Beta 1 on a raw disk under Virtual Server 2005.

    - press SHIFT-F10 and click "Install Now" which opens a command window.
    - diskpart
    - select disk 0
    - convert gpt
    - create partition efi
    - select partition=1
    - assign letter=c
    - select volume 1 (volume 0 has the disk image)
    - format fs=ntfs

    "DiskPart encountered an unexpected error. Check the system event log for moreinformation on the failure."

    Could someone please direct me to more detailed instructions on how to install Vista Beta 1 on a raw disk under Virtual Server 2005?

    Thanks!
  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2005
    A friend told me that it appeared to hang on the screen that said "DO NOT RESTART YOUR COMPUTER AT THIS TIME" for hours but finally installed. Be patient!
  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2005
    Travis, I've done all this and got the same error. So I start over again:

    - select disk 0
    - create partition
    - format
    - active

    And than I got no error.. I have the 9GB NTFS partition active and working but still doesn't work ..
    Click "Install Now" and after few seconds return the same page "Install Now" click again, again and again and nothing happend :(

    Anyone could help?

    I'm use Virtual Server 2005
  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2005
    I cannot find a way to get VPC to show DVD instead of CDROM. When I put in a Bootable DVD
    (made from the released DVD iso image of Vista) I just get an error of 'Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device' Any Ideas?
  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2005
    Finally !!!!!

    After upgrading Virtual Server 2005 with SP1 Beta my Windows Vista work just fine.
  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2005
    I got VPC to boot directly off of the DVD media on an AMD64 laptop. On an AMD XP desktop, the same media won't boot. [My DVD writer was configured as drive 'I' on the desktop]

    Also, the install failed on the notebook - because I could not allocate more than 256MB of RAM - the installer would simply [after using diskpart and rebooting] launch, hang, then quit.

    ...odd or what?
  • Anonymous
    August 15, 2005
    I tried to install windows vista beta under Virtual PC 7.02 which is installed on my Powermac G5. during the windows boot process, I get this following error:

    Windows Boot Manager has experienced a problem.

    Status: 0xc0000225

    Info: Windows failed to load because the firmware (BIOS) is not ACPI compatible.

    File: ¶ (a strange looking character that looks like the letter F, but backwards).

    Does anyone have any idea how I can bypass this. Thanks
  • Anonymous
    August 15, 2005
    Mike -

    We have had a number of reports of Vista installs simply failing because not enough memory was assigned to the virtual machine.

    Bhagiratha -

    You will need to enable ACPI in the BIOS of the virtual machine (you can get into this by hitting DEL as soon as the virtual machine boots).

    Cheers,
    Ben
  • Anonymous
    August 16, 2005
    I installed Vista on VPC on my laptop. But whenever I come back from sleep mode, the vpc screen is not refreshing by itself. I had to switch between full screen mode to window mode and vice-versa to see any affects such as opening a menu etc. This is very nagging and I had to restart host OS to avoid this.

    Do you know what could be the problem?
  • Anonymous
    August 18, 2005
    I got it to work on the desktop - I had 1GB total RAM, and was able to let the Virtual Machine have 512MB.

    The performance, however, is so bad that, at this point, installing it is only useful for seeing that it can be done. [It's like running Windows XP under PearPC if Windows XP was for the PowerPC CPU type.]
  • Anonymous
    August 26, 2005
    I foudn this article after reading here about Diskpart... ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnxpesp2/html/tchHowToDemonstrateWindowsXPEmbeddedUsingVirtualPC.asp)


    Partition the Disk

    To start your new Virtual Machine, use the Windows PE CD (CD 1 of your Windows Embedded tools). (The Windows XP Embedded evaluation CD is available at this web site.

    It is also available from a Microsoft Embedded Authorized Distributor.
    To partition the disk:

    1. Type the following command from a command prompt: DISKPART
    2. Type the following commands to create the partition:

    SELECT DISK 0
    CLEAN
    CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
    This creates a 16 GB partition.
    3. Type the following command to verify the partition:

    LIST PARTITION

    4. Type the following commands to verify that the partition is active:

    SELECT PARTITION 1
    ACTIVE

    5. Type EXIT to quit DISKPART.
    6. Type EXIT again to reboot Windows PE.

    Format the Partition

    At the command prompt, type the following command to format the new partition:

    FORMAT C: /FS:NTFS /q

    I rebooted & pressed SHIFT-F10 and click "Install Now" which opens a command window. Typed diskpart

    SELECT DISK 0
    CLEAN
    CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
    LIST PARTITION
    SELECT PARTITION 1
    ACTIVE
    FORMAT