Virtual PC and DVD
It is quite frustrating to discover that Virtual PC 2004 does not support DVD ISO images larger than 2.2 GB. I downloaded the latest VS 2005 beta DVD image from MSDN Subscription site (the CD ISO images do not have Team System support) and tried to mount it on my Virtual PC. This is the message I got.
Since my only DVD burner is on a Mac Powerbook, which produces disks that the PC cannot read, I have to work with the DVD image. So, I decided to mount the DVD image to a virtual drive letter (Z:) on the host PC using the "Virtual CDROM Control Panel for WinXP" utility from MSDN. Then I can map Virtual PC's CD drive to the host Z: drive to access the DVD content. It will be slow (two emulation layers) but I expected it to work. Well, it seemed to work initially. I can start the installation process. But as the program reads large amount of data from the virtual drive, it begins to throw I/O errors and has to abort before it can finish half of the installation.
Finally, I managed to get it to work by first unpacking the entire DVD image into a local file directory using ISOBuster; share the directory with the Virtual PC; and then execute setup.exe in the directory from within Virtual PC. Anyone has a better idea?