18 April 2012

Running IE Application Compatibility VPC under Virtual Box

This post is no longer necessary as microsoft now provide official virtualbox images, yay!
http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads

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Microsoft provide Virtual PC images for testing your website with IE. You can download them from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575

Note that the XP image has no expired so is no use, it will reboot immediately after login.

I wanted to make use of the Win 7 / IE 9 image, however Virtual PC is unavailable on Linux. Fortunately VirtualBox can mount Virtual PC's disk images.

For me the image would get half way through booting windows, and then blue-screen (BSOD). I discovered that it was possible to get past this by removing the SATA controller the machine's settings, and instead adding the disk under the IDE controller. After that the machine booted successfully.




Capturing the BSOD, basically press F8 after a lot rebooting, and select "disable automatic restart on system failure" (ref: http://www.webtlk.com/2009/07/02/how-to-stop-windows-7-reboot-loop/)


And here's the bluescreen:

5 comments:

Andrew Scheller said...

A thousand thankyous!!!
I was beginning to think Microsoft had "fixed" their VPC images to not work in VirtualBox. But after following this tip both the Vista and Windows7 imaes work fine :-)

Although I had problems with an invisible mouse, but they went away after installing VirtualBox Guest Additions (using just the keyboard!)

Lee said...

Thanks a million! Had a hard time getting this to work even in Windows Virtual PC. Virtualbox did the trick.

Tim Abell said...

Glad to have helped others :-) Now, if only we didn't have to support IE at all...

Anonymous said...

Great post! Helped me out as well. Thanks for sharing.

Regards from Holland, Ben

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much! I was going crazy trying to figure this one out.