I’ve been posting a series of Vista / VMware related articles on installation and configuration of Vista Beta 1 on VMware v5 build 13124. There are a few things I want to pass along after several days and a weekend of playing around with Vista, VMware and reading blog posts of other people experiences.
- This is beta code, specifically beta 1 code. If it all works perfectly and has no bugs or errors you should immediately go buy a lotto ticket because it is your lucky day.
- There is some strange behaviour with the hard disk partitioning and formatting. Many have no problems and can use the Vista installer to partition (GUI, not DiskPart), reboot and then format and install. One of my previous articles outlines the steps needed to install this way. The trick is…it just isn’t a stable method. I’ve done it close to 10 times now both for testing while writing a blog post and for my own VMs. It always works for me and works on different host machines. That’s not the case for everyone.
- I posted an article about sound support in the VM. This works great for me and many other people. It is however beta code and it is obviously not working for everyone. Some people are reporting PFN_LIST_CORRUPT BSODs. This is a corrupted memory error and is usually caused by a bad driver. Other than telling you that I set aside 512 MB of RAM for my VMs a LAST_KNOWN boot is the only thing I know to do in order to fix that problem. It is a memory problem so the amount of memory you give Vista could very well throttle the BSOD as well, in connection with the sound driver of course. Since the driver is for Windows XP it really doesn’t surprise me that Vista barfs of it occasionally or all the time actually. Honestly VMware doesn’t officially support Vista Beta 1 so we don’t have anyone to blame. If someone finds a better driver for sound please let me/us know.
As for the PFN_LIST_CORRUPT, that is the glory of beta testing. All the suggestions here have worked for me so far and are consistent. Please continue to ask questions and put my suggestions to the test as you have all weekend.