Windows 7 (RC1) Virtual XP and TI 2009

TI installs in the virtual machine and will open. Howver, it hangs and causes the virtual machine to lose contact if it tries to access a large USB drive that has been attached to the virtual machine.

It might be a drive size problem. My USB drives have two partitions one about 100MB that contains the Acronis boot environment and then 120GB partition. It is this partition that causes TI to choke during the splash screen 'accessing drives' segment.

Once killed in task manager the virtual machine becomes unstable and has to be closed.

It should be noted of course that this is RC1 running a beta version of virtualXP.

It may also be a RAM problem the virtual machine only assigns 256MB to itself, and I've yet to find out how to increase this when the VM is not running.

Colin

 

Colin:

Start > All Programs > Virtual PC > Virtual Machines. Right-click on Virtual Windows XP.vmcx and choose Settings. Try 512 MB of RAM. Note that the VM must be powered down before you can change some of the settings.

 

Thanks Mark,

Changing RAM size to 512 got a bit further, as far as the assigning 2-2 text. I then increased RAM to 1023 but it still didn't work, in fact it, and a competitors product seem to cause the external USB port to hang.

With TI the drive goes into a 'ready' state as the status LED on the drive goes from red (read/write) to green. Using the competitors product the drive actually switched off. With TI the drive must be attached rather than accessed via the virtual network drive, with the other product it allows the drive to be attached as a network drive and then fails.

Of course, I'm not sure if there is much to be gained trying to image a virtual drive, when imaging the host drive would include the virtual image as well.

Not quite in W7, there is no option on the right click for settings, but here there is: C:\Users\log_on_name\Virtual Machines\Virtual Windows XP.vmcx , whether this is down to using DOPUS as my file manager rather than Explorer I'm not certain.

Colin

 

There is no reason to make an image of a virtual hard disk. Just make a copy of the virtual hard disk file (Virtual Windows XP.vhd) to be used as a backup. If your VM ever gets completely messed up, just replace the .vhd file with the backup.

I'm not sure why your USB hard disks were not functioning correctly. I was able to attach an 8 GB USB flash drive to the VM and read/write to it successfully. I didn't try a USB hard disk however.

I agree that this VM is rather fragile. It doesn't survive the PC going into standby, for example. MudCrab would be happy to know that the audio is much, much improved over Virtual PC 2007.

 

I've done it both ways. One advantage of imaging the VM drive is that it can save a lot of space. My big VM drive goes from 63.1GB to 42.3GB when imaged. On small VM drives, I usually just copy them as it's not worth the time or space savings to image them.

That sounds good... I hope to have time soon to run some tests on this and the other new features.