Virtual PC 2004 and DVD ISO Image Limitations

May be it's an age thing but gone are the days when I was willing to try that little bit of beta software that looked oh so tempting only to find it has trashed my system and then to be faced with hours rebuilding my system.

So if are anything like me then you love Virtual PC 2004 for trying out new bits in safety but you might have also spotted a rather irritating limitation for loading up large DVD ISO Images (for example Visual Studio 2005 CTP ISOs), Virtual PC 2004 (and Virtual Server) doesn't support ISO images greater than 2.2 GB, grrrr.

Fortunately there are some easy work arounds which work by loading up the large ISO image using a Virtual CD/DVD driver on your host system and then connecting to that drive from within your host system via Virtual PCs Shared Folder support, ahhh:-)

Check out https://www.robertmoir.co.uk/win/vpcfaq/VPCFAQ7-KnownIssueswithVP.html for a good description of some of the work around solutions...

I dug out my licence of Nero 5.x and spotted Nero DriveImage, now this is seriously a cool piece of stable software and I now just install software from ISO with DriveImage (VPC or not). Well pleased...