I hope this hasn't been addressed in any obvious place I just couldn't find.

How do I get two hard drives on a Virtual PC machine so that a new install of XP sees them both?

I'm testing an nLite unattended XP compilation in Virtual PC 2007. It works fine with a single 5GB virtual hard drive.

For my next feat , I want to create a second 1GB hard drive for the VPC, save some files there (as they would be on the second drive of a two-drive real machine), install XP on the first drive again and in the final stages of the unattended installation, copy certain files from the D (second hard) drive to the C (first hard) drive. I think I know how to make that happen with GuiRunOnce, the problem is with the second drive.

VCP allows me to set up up to four three hard drives, and in the settings for my test machine, it lists two drives. But Windows XP only sees the drive it installed itself on. The D drive in the virtual machine is the virtual CD drive where the unattended ISO is mounted.

Is this not possible to do? Will I have any more success with VirtualBox? I don't want to buy VM Ware just to do something that Virtual PC should be capable of.

Thanks.

Ray

Edited May 9, 200719 yr by NOTS3W

Use Partition Magic bootable version to boot your virtual machine on virtual PC 2007.

Create any partitions you like, then boot your Win XP into this machine.

Your partitions will be visible for you to chose for installation of OS.

I've done it alright

Use a Daemon Tools virtual CD with drive H:

Either of those methods should work, but I shouldn't have to do that since VPC creates the virtual drives. I just need a way to get to them from XP. Last night I discovered the solution which is not documented anywhere that I can find:

From a working Windows VPC, I used disk management to change the CD drive assignment from D to E. The second hard drive had never been formatted (my oversight) so Windows wasn't recognizing it. I fixed that, assigned the letter D: and copied some files to it.

After reinstalling XP, I still have both drives and the second one still has the files I put there before the install.

Now I can use RunOnce to move files from an existing D drive to the new Windows installation on C (I hope).

Ray