For those of you who want to try Vista Beta 1 on VirtualPC there are some pitfals.
[From readme.txt]
Setup in this release of "Longhorn" versions of Windows does not support
installing to "RAW" disks (disks without a partition). To work around this
issue, install the "Longhorn" version of Windows on a partitioned disk. If you
must install to a RAW disk, press SHIFT+F10 to open a command prompt. Use the
Diskpart utility to create a disk partition. Restart the computer after creating
the partition, and start Setup again. The disk should be available for use.
VPC creates a RAW pdisk... so
- First and foremost, you need to have atleast a gig of phyiscal memory on the host (Eg. your machine)
- Allocate around 512MB Min to the guest OS
- Create a hard-disk with atleast 20GB of space (or dynamically growing)
- VPC
cant read the ISO of the Beta 1 DVD, so you'll need to get something
like Alcohol 120% or something to mount the ISO image as a virtual
drive on your system and let VPC use that.
Then launch the VM session, mounting to the Virtual drive(or physical if you burned it!) and after POST you'll get
the Longhorn PE. This is a mini-edition of the longhorn system that is
going to go through the installation process - no longer a fugly
installation process.
After all the productkey/eula stuff goes you'll come up with "The
Partition you selected is not available for installation..." Click next
here and the dsik should say "Unavailable".
Here you do this:
- SHIFT+F10 to launch the command line
- type "format C: /fs:ntfs /q" without the quotes which formats (quickly) the C drive as NTFS
- After format run "shutdown /r" without the quotes to reset your machine
- Relaunch Vista setup ignoring any BSoDs
If you keep getting BSoDs you'll need to run "chdsk /r" without the quotes.
EDIT:
I found some alternate pages for *your* enjoyment: