eliasen - Virtualization Technology messed up saved state for Virtual PCs

Sunday, 07 March 2010

Virtualization Technology messed up saved state for Virtual PCs

Hi all

I have just installed VMware WorkStation 7.0.1 in order to start building 64bit guest OS’es in order to try out Windows Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010. Microsoft Virtual PC does not support 64bit guest operating systems, and since I really appreciate being able to run guest operating systems in a window on my host PC I saw no other way out than getting and installing VMware WorkStation.

Now, after installing it, I tried to create my first Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine, but that failed because I hadn’t enabled Virtualization Technology (VT) in my BIOS. So I rebooted, entered BIOS and enabled it. That worked fine, and I now have a virtual machine running Windows 2008 R2 64bit.

BUT, when I then wanted to fire up one of my old Microsoft Virtual PC virtual machines that I had earlier saved, I got an error saying that the saved file was corrupt. I had the choice of deleting the saved file or doing nothing. Since I needed the VPC, I chose to delete the saved file information and hope that I could recreate what was then lost.

Then, when starting up my next saved virtual machine from Microsoft Virtual PC, I got the same error. I have now played around with it, and it simply seems that if I save the state of a VPC and then turn on VT, the file gets corrupted and cannot be used :-( I even tried saving state when VT was enabled, and then I disabled it and reenabled it. Saved file was again corrupt :-(