Don’t Rebuild Virtual PC’s, Copy Them

At work, I run Vista Business as my primary OS and I use several virtual PC’s (my tool of choice is Microsoft Virtual PC 2007) with Windows XP loaded on them so I can test development projects and have the ability to maintain a common “alternate” environment. For obvious reasons, this is preferred over having a different physical machine or a separate boot for each environment.

One very handy trick I found is that you can copy virtual hard drives (.vhd) files and instantly get another environment. For example, you could build a new virtual PC hard drive and load XP with all the updates and then simply copy the VHD file to a new file name and, whola!, you now have two ready to go environments. All you have to do is just run through the virtual PC creation wizard and set it to use an existing hard drive (your copied VHD file) and you are ready to go.

If you have to deploy several environments quickly, this is a great trick to know.

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Saqib
I have a Windows 2003 Virtual PC which I built it on Vista Home but when I copied it on Vista Business and tried to run it. it keeps rebooting it. Any suggestions?
Jason Faulkner
You know, I have never tested it with a Server OS, only XP/2000. Does the original one still work fine?
Saqib
Yes the original works fine.
Jimmie
You should probably copy the settings file too, that is located in the same folder.
Files
QUESTION:
I am running XP, and using VM Windows server.
I works great.
I would like to move my VM enviromnment to my laptop, so I tried to copy the files (2) from the VM folder to a 8 GM USB stick.
The folder is only 4 gigs, but it returns an error ” not enough space” WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
does anyone know what I did wrong??
thx