Getting MS Virtual PC and VMware to play nice together

This morning I processed a few photos and also tried to get Windows Virtual PC and VMWare running okay alongside each other. The problem is that VMWare doesn't like the CPU being in VMX operation, which VPC puts it in.

In Virtual PC 2007 you could change the setting to disable hardware virtualization on a per Virtual Machine basis, but in the Windows 7 version of Virtual PC no such setting exists. And you can't install the older Virtual PC 2007 in Windows 7 either.

On the thread I started in the Windows 7 forums, I was told that you would need to disable hardware virtualization in the BIOS. But I thought that might negatively affect my VMWare Virtual Machine. So I thought I'd see if I could run the Windows XP mode VHD in VMWare.

Reading this thread: How do I convert a .vhd disk image to work with VMWare? there were two suggestions I thought sounded good - one was to convert the VHD to a VMDK, and the other suggestion was to mount the VHD as a drive in Windows, and then use that drive for your VM in VMWare.

I looked into the second suggestion first. Mounting the VHD as a drive via the Disk Management snap-in was very easy. But when I tried to create a new VM in the VMware Server 2.0 control panel, there wasn't any option to use a physical drive.

After doing some reading I came across this thread: How to use Physical Hard Drive or it's partitions with VMWare server 2 ? (Linux), which made it sound quite difficult.

So I decided to try converting the VHD to a VMDK instead. After converting the XP mode VHD to a VMDK, and then creating a VM using this disk image, the VM started up okay. Windows (in the VM) then said that it had found lots of new hardware, so I told it to install the drivers automatically.

But then after installing the drivers the keyboard and mouse stopped working (in the VM). So I restarted it, and the keyboard worked, but there was no mouse cursor. Using the keyboard I went into the control panel and disabled 2 mouse device entries. After restarting the mouse now worked okay.

Next I installed the VMWare tools on the VM using the VMWare control panel on the host machine. But this then messed up the mouse - although you could see the cursor and move it around, where you clicked seemed to always be right on the edge of the screen (making navigating with the mouse impossible).

So I decided to just try disabling hardware virtualization in my PC's BIOS. However, when I went into the BIOS, I couldn't find any options to do with virtualization. After doing some googling, I found that for the Asus p5b motherboard, the option is called 'Vanderpool Technology'.

After disabling Vanderpool technology in the BIOS, I can now use both VMWare and VPC at the same time.

I processed some more photos for the rest of the afternoon.

In the evening I watched an episode of Life with Mauser and Bo, and then watched Uruguay vs. Holland.