If you’re reading this article, chances are you’ve googled ‘ installing OS VPC 2007″ or “installing operating system on microsoft virtual pc 2007″ or…the list goes on. Either ways, I’m excited that you’re here to find out how to install an operating system on a VPC 2007. This is a pretty trivial task. But if you’ve never done this before, you could find this article useful. I was working on setting up a new SharePoint VPC and realized it would be helpful to others if I share what I encounter along the way.
Installing the new OS on Virtual PC 2007
1. First step involved is to boot the guest machine. Here, you’ll need to select the appropriate virtual machine from the list of the configured VMs as shown in the screen shot below and click Start.
2. You’ll notice the VM recognizes certain attributes like the amount of physical RAM that you allocated to it during the VM’s configuration. It also recognizes the number of hard disks allocated to the VM. You can configure a max. of 3 disks for a VM.
3. Here, we’re missing an OS on the hard disk. So the VM will boot like any other hard disk that has no operating system installed. In this case, it attempts to boot via the network. In most cases it will not succeed, unless you have some sort of RIS or other PXE-based network booting system set up on your network.
4. In your VM’s window, click CD and then Capture ISO Image and browse to the .ISO’s location, or insert a real installation media in the host’s physical CD/DVD drive.
5. Reset your VM by pressing RIGHT ALT+R, or clicking on Action > Reset.
6. After the reset, the setup process will begin.
Microsoft Virtual PC is a fantastic and easy way to deploy environments totally free of cost.
