Hello everyone, I'm just wondering how SAFE and possible it is for me to set up a virtual partition on my computer, and then install windows 7 on it? I have the 32 bit beta from the microsoft website.
I have never set up virtual partitions before.

I would install it on my backup machine, but its not powerful, so I'd like to try it on my more powerful but primary machine - and really don't want to screw it up.

How easy and how safe is it to do this? If it is very dangerous I won't try it, but I've gone to all the effort of downloading the beta now...

If you COULD, some kind of step-by-step guide would be rather useful. Here Ya Go...As awesome as that link is, can I just check something?
I'm running windows XP... should have mentioned that.install Virtual PC or something, then. that should work.And the windows 7 installer will recognize it? Ok, cool. I'll try it tomorrow.When you install Virtual PC, you don't NEED to burn it to a CD.
You can use the .ISO file and get Virtual PC to treat it as a CD.This is a coincidence because I just (yesterday) installed Windows 7 Public Beta (build 7000) using VMWare Workstation. First of all I downloaded the public beta ISO 2.5 GB file and burned it to a DVD-R and then I created a virtual machine in VMWare and booted it off the install DVD. The install halted and said it could not read install.wim. I did a bit of Googling and found that this most likely a bad burn. Apparently Microsoft say you should burn the disk at the slowest speed your DVD burner supports. I had used 8x but my burner goes down to 2x for that brand so that was my fault. Anyway, I then remembered that virtualizing apps like VMWare and Virtual PC support using the ISO file without having to burn it, as Carbon Dudeoxide said above. So I installed that way and it all WENT just fine. I am sure Virtual PC will be the same. I have a 3 GHz Pentium 4 (Prescott) with 1 GB of RAM. Windows 7 has 512 MB allocated and seems a little slow run like this, whereas OpenSuSe 11.0 (also with 512 MB) gives a very smooth and snappy experience.

There are very well seeded torrents around of ready made VMWare virtual machines of this Windows 7 Beta, but I like to do things the hard way...

I must say, at first look, I don't like the Windows 7 era GUI one little bit.
"First of all I downloaded the public beta ISO 2.5 GB file and burned it to a DVD-R and then I created a virtual machine in VMWare and booted it off the install DVD. The install halted and said it could not read install.wim. I did a bit of Googling and found that this most likely a bad burn."


I had that happen to me too. It was the IDE cable on the dvd player that was bad. Try swapping it out.Quote from: Briguy on January 11, 2009, 08:42:11 AM

"First of all I downloaded the public beta ISO 2.5 GB file and burned it to a DVD-R and then I created a virtual machine in VMWare and booted it off the install DVD. The install halted and said it could not read install.wim. I did a bit of Googling and found that this most likely a bad burn."


I had that happen to me too. It was the IDE cable on the dvd player that was bad. Try swapping it out.

At first, I thought, maybe formatting virtual partition in SCSI was at fault ( I had this problem with installing 7 pre-beta), so I created new partition, using IDE.

3. Install from .iso on hard drive

I used SCSI (it was recommended in the VMWare virtual machine setup)

How easy and how safe is it to do this? If it is very dangerous I won't try it, but I've gone to all the effort of downloading the beta now...