XPE on VPC redux

[Guest]

Been searching through the posts for an answer, but haven't been able to find
what I need (I also can't access microsoft.public.virtualpc through msdn, so
I post here).

In order to speed the development of my prototype, I'd like to use Virtual
PC to make things go faster. However, the number of steps you have to go
through to do this is annoying to say the least. What I'd like to do is to
create a virtual disk that is mapped to a directory on my development drive.
Doing this, I could map this drive to my Embedded Images directory and cut
out all the other steps in the process. A use case would be:

Go into Virtual PC, create a new machine
Add a virtual drive to this pc. This drive's root is c:\windows embedded
images, is the same file system (ntfs), and has a maximum size
Create a component for the VPC (run TAP from xpe, download one from
xpefiles, whatever)
Create an image in Target Designer, saving it to c:\windows embedded images
Boot the VPC, which runs from the directory like it would from a hard drive
After testing, return to Target Designer, make changes, and rebuild the image
Boot the VPC again and test changes

Is there any way to do this? Seems like it would be very easy to do and
very useful. Thanks.

 

[Guest]

Hi William

Easiest way to do this is use WiNPE and boot the Virtual machine off
this, its on the first disk of your toolkit, just place in CDROM drive and
boot into WinPE. This comes with basic networking support. You then need to
use Microsoft loopback adaptor on host and Virtual machine as your Ethernet
adaptor. How to setup MS loopback adaptor is contained in the help for
Virtual PC. Once you have a network connection (test with ping, use ipconfig
to check ip address) you can use the "net use Z: \\computername\drive"
command to map a drive on the virtual machine to your host machine. I've done
it and it works. Hope this kind of makes sense.

Regards
ms

 

[Guest]

Does make sense, thanks, but it's still a multistep process. And, because I
downloaded my trial of XPE, I don't have the toolkit cd's. I'm trying to
avoid all this, and have a 2 step process: 1) build image 2) run VPC on
image.