Friday 19 June 2009

Virtual PC Installation woes

Virtualisation is a great technology. Not only can we test installs of applications against pretty much any operating system, we can also test websites against different browsers (such as IE 6, 7, 8) which do not normally run side by side.

However, I came across a rather annoying, undocumented feature of Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 this week. Having created a VM on my laptop, I wanted to move it to my main PC where it's final home will be. I am running Vista Business (no comments pls) and when I tried to install it I received an error product.cab is corrupt. I first thought this was a bad download, so I redownloaded it - same result.

Bizzare. I then tried the Service pack 1 version, after all this should fix lots of issues, and maybe this would be one of them. Sadly, no. I got the same error.

I then tried to download the version via my MSDN subscription, rather than the public download. Sadly, same result.

I then decided, I would just install VMWare's player and convert my MS VPC to a VMWare version. Sadly, I had a similar error when trying to install VMWare Player.

I'd not had this issue before, so was now quite stumped. I had been trying to install this over a remote deskop connection, so when I returned home, I tried installing it locally. I got the same issue.

Just before giving up, I remembered that old, rarely known trick... I restarted the computer. Low and behold, the next time I tried to install it, everything was fine!

So if you are getting this error, don't be afraid to try the good old restart!

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