Virtual PC with a hard disk with two partitions?

[teo2706]

Hello,

I've tried to create a virtual hard disk with two partitions, but I'm
having problems with booting from such a virtual hard drive.

First test - I tried to have two primary partitions in my virtual hard
disk. I formatted both partitions and I marked the first of them as
active and put Windows XP Embedded on it. On the second primary
partition I put a few applications. When I tried to boot from the
virtual hard drive, the Virtual PC just hangs. No error message is
printed.

Second test - I tried to have one primary partition and one extended
partition with a single logical drive on it. I formatted both
partitions and marked the primary partition as active. I put Windows
XP Embedded on the primary partition. On the second partition I put
the applications. When I tried to boot from the virtual hard drive,
the Virtual PC hangs in the same manner as in test 1. No error message
is printed.

My question is whether Virtual PC supports booting from a virtual hard
drive, that has more than a single partition?

Teodor

 

[Ethan Chen]

Hi Teodor,

You can reference to the following steps to configure you VPC. You should
have 2 VM, one is XP Pro with 2 virtual HDD (a: XP Pro OS & b: Empty) and the
other VM is XPe which has 1 virtual HDD (b: Empty).

Prepare the XPETARGET VM
1. Open Virtual PC 2004.
2. Start the XP Pro VM. The XPETARGET virtual hard drive should be a second
hard drive in the XP Pro VM.
3. When the VM finally boots, open Explorer in the VM and format the second
virtual hard drive.

Testing the image.
Now we will copy the image using the XPPro VM, and then boot into the
XPETARGET VM.
1. On the desktop, open Explorer
2. Make sure that you have Explorer open to the second hard drive in the XP
pro VM, drag and drop the image found in the desktop under c:\Windows
Embedded Image and copy it to the root of the second hard drive of the XP
Pro VM.
3. Once the image copy has completed close Explorer in both systems.
4. Shutdown the XP Pro VM
5. Start the XPETARGET VM. This will boot the XPe image and start running FBA.

 

[Ethan Chen]

Hi Mike,

"When the VM finally boots, open Explorer in the VM and format the second
virtual hard drive"

During this step, you can set 2 or more partitions for this virtual hard
drive.