Sorting it all Out Michael Kaplan's random stuff of dubious value Be sure to read the disclaimer here first!
Well, I had a few idle moments today, so I thought I would try to do what a ton of Beta sites would be doing as soon as Beta 1 of Longhorn hit the streets. Install it on a Virtual PC image.
These days, the smart beta testers are always using products like Virtual PC for their betas -- better to keep one's own machines clean, right.
So, I got started....
No, I am not going to give everyone a ton of screen shots. :-)
I thought I would point out one problem I had though. When I tried to pick the drive to install to, Longhorn would not recognize the VPC drive. To get it to recognize the drive, I did the following:
It was a fairly easy workaround, but it did inspire a momentary panic when I first thought that Virtual PC might not be available for the beta. There may not be an immediate fix it it is a Virtual PC 2004 issue, after all.
I then played around a bit after it was installed, everything seemed functional. I then thought I would test out something that had been pointed out by a colleague who had been experimenting with a small setup change (translation: "was goofing off in the late afternoon"). I did the same somewhat destructive act on the registry and then rebooted my virtual Longhorn image. In prior versions this would cause the following effect:
Not the most intuitive message, huh? Well, you can file this next bit in the "truth is stranger then fiction" department.
A while back, BBspot ran an article entitled Microsoft: The Next 25 Years. One of the predictive entries read:
2016 Microsoft enhances their only innovation by introducing the "Red Screen of Death."
Well, here on Longhorn, roughly 11 years early:
Well, that will teach me, right? Luckily the recovery was easy (just rebooted, went to "last known good", undid that destructive operation, and then rebooted. And all was right with the world.
I am not sure I would class the change as an improvement. I mean, the old message ("Windows cannot start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\System32") is one I understand since I know what the destructive operation was. But if I did not have that knowledge then I would not know much about what was going on.
The new message, though, is even harder to understand (though an internet search of 0xc000000f will see it relates to Windows File Protection, which I guess is a hint.
Lucky for me that this is not the sort of thing one sees unless one is intentionally performing destructive operations, huh? :-)