Myself and a colleague recently discovered a problem with installing Visual Studio .NET (Beta 2) Team Suite on a Virtual Server installation of Windows Server 2003 (SP1). Essentially the install program would fail when attempting to install MDAC and would throw the error
1305 Error Reading from file:
Verify that the file exists and you can access it.
After the guru (a.k.a. google) came back with the explanation that this was essentially a media error, the wheels started to turn. We were using the ISO image of the dvd (downloaded from the MSDN Site) and mounting that ISO directly to the virtual server through its configuration. I also noticed that I could access the file in question if I mounted the ISO to a virtual CD rom on the host machine (using the Microsoft ISO mounting software) but I could NOT read the file from the virtual machine when mounted through Virtual Server.
This boils down to one observation. For whatever reason, the Virtual Server Virtualization CD Rom does not like the ISO for Visual Studio 2005.
Resolution:
On a hunch, I burned the ISO image back to a blank DVD (native image burning, not just writing the iso file to the disc). I then placed that new disc into the physical drive on the host machine, reconfigured the virtual server to point its DVDROM drive to the physical drive on the host and re-ran the installation.
eh voila! The installation completed without incident.