Roger Mills wrote:
On 21/04/2017 11:21, Paul wrote:
Roger Mills wrote:
On 21/04/2017 10:23, Paul wrote:

Summary: Delete the .vsv and retry... You're deleting the
hiberfile when doing that, and Windows could (worst case)
need to tidy up on the next run, using CHKDSK.

Paul


Thanks. I'll have a close look at that.

In a way, this is like real physical machines. If you
hibernate WinXP over and over and over again... eventually
it'll fall over. Things like memory errors, even if the
background rate is low, can accumulate over time. and it's
not clear there is any recovery mechanism for hiberated
machines - short of truly shutting them down and
rebooting them properly.

The default setup when I tested just now, is the Settings
panel for Virtual PC defines "Power button = hibernate".
I changed from the default, selected "Shutdown" instead,
and the .vsv file can disappear at shutdown as a result.

To operate the machine, instead of using "logout" in the
Start menu, I've been using my old standby, the Alt-F4
hotkey sequence. As that offers the rest of the shutdown
options. You should also be able to get that from Task
Manager, if you wanted.

I'm surprised mine hasn't tipped over yet, I've been
having so much fun with it. Windows Updates... almost done.

Have fun,
Paul

My virtual machine is set to shut down when the application closes. I
can't find any .vsv.files.

My wife's main computer at home is still running XP. When we go away
from home (we're away now) for a few days we take the Win 7 Pro laptop
and she uses the Virtual XP Machine on it. Her data is all on an
external USB drive, so we're not desperate to get at the data on the
virtual machine, but it's annoying that she can't run her legacy
applications.

This was set up using the laptop's original HDD - which was then cloned
onto an SSD. I think the HDD is still intact in a cupboard back at home.
I'm tempted to copy all of the virtual machine files from that onto the
SSD, on the assumptions that the files on the SSD have somehow got
corrupted. Do you think that might work?

Another thing that comes to mind, is you could stay in Virtual PC world,
go to the Settings box for the WinXPMode machine, and set the CD to point
to your ISO9660 copy of WinXP SP3 (an installer CD of SP3 level).

First, boot to command prompt on the CD. There is an option, to instead
of installing, do some repairs. And the Command Prompt is an option there.
You could run CHKDSK. (Before you try that, you want to back up the
virtual machine files, in case it fouls up. CHKDSK is a repair in place
utility, which can damage things, just as easily as it can fix them.)

If the volume has good NTFS properties, you could then try booting
a second time, and do a Repair Install. Afterwards, you'd have to
redo your Windows Update, put back IE8 or whatever, which is still
a lot of work. But it might be a way to recover your previous setup,
assuming no other triage is possible.

One problem with doing that, so going to be the activation...
Will it activate automatically ? I don't think there's a chance in
hell that will happen. So right away, I can see this being a non-starter.

It's becoming clearer now, that best practice with the "crap",
is frequent backups (Macrium, Acronis, Ghost, or whatever). As
long as you have previous copies of the "Windows XP Mode.vhd" file,
you'll be in good company. And since, by default, it's not merged,
both the parent and child (the big VHD) have to be captured.
If the VHD is merged (disabling differencing, making the output
file of the merge operation the primary VHD file), then only the
one file would need to be kept.

7-ZIP can normally open regular VHD files. I use this for getting
files out of virtual machines for example. However, the "Windows XP Mode.vhd"
file is a "child" (according to the VirtualBox labeling), and 7-ZIP
cannot handle the header format differences and refuses to open it.
So yet another option I was counting on, didn't work. The merged file
on the other hand ("pig.vhd"), that worked fine. Let's hope that "merging"
is not dependent on the virtual disk health to work.

Paul