Even Virtual PC Can Crash

I run a lot of instances of Microsoft's Virtual PC to keep my personal and business records separate from my development workstation. I find that this separation very convenient where I the virtual disk drive with the OS and application data is small enough to fit on a single DVD.

This way the Virtual PC's are very portable where I can take the DVD and copy it to a new workstation and continue work in the event that I need to upgrade to a new workstation. Now reinstallation, no mess, just takes a couple of minutes to copy the file to the new machine.

But Virtual PC's do crash.

The typical scenario that you will run into is when you have automatic updates enabled or install new applications that modify the OS or drivers.

My last virtual crash happened when I installed this year's TurboTax. The new version required .NET 2.0 so it had to download upgrade from .NET 1.0. Remember, I keep these virtual drives small enough to fit on a DVD, so the install failed and left the drive with zero space.

I run the disk cleanup utility and now it has 600M which is plenty of room to install .NET and TurboTax. The .NET install always requires a reboot of the machine so it reboots and hangs on a corrupt pci.sys driver.

I don't know how the file went bad, but I couldn't even reboot in safe mode or recover from the Windows install disk.

The nice thing about Virtual PC's is that you can mount or add new drives. To fix this problem, I simply mount the drive to a different virtual instance and the bad virtual drive with pci.sys now shows up as D:. Copy the good pci.sys from C: to D: and the problem is solved.

All computers can crash but Virtual PC's are very easy to fix especially if you keep a backup on a DVD or make a copy just prior installing new drivers.