Way Too Hard
October 10th, 2006 by Lou
I recently purchased an X4100 from my employer, Sun. I have a certification from VMware and wanted to hone my skills in the area. I’ve had quite a bit of success and (dare I say it) fun hacking away on the installation, creating virtual machines with various operating systems and so forth.
The fun ended today when I tried to install XP Professional from an upgrade distribution. So for those that might try this, I have several cautionary notes:
- buy the full version of XP, the aggravation isn’t worth it
- if you MUST use the upgrade, make sure you have an ISO of the installation CD of whatever Windows OS you are attempting to upgrade
So here is what I’ve found. To start with, the installation process either needs to be on top of an existing, upgradable installation, or you need the original installation CD/DVD for the OS you are upgrading from. No big surprise here, but I had hoped my old keys would suffice.
I seriously didn’t think this would be a problem. Despite who I work for, I’ve purchased many PCs over the years, as has my employer, so I didn’t think it sensible to pay full boat for XP Professional, currently running $300. So I bought the upgrade for $200.
So here’s some of the problems:
- The XP installer didn’t recognize any of the various OS CDs I put in my X4100 when it insisted during the install.
- The installer wouldn’t recognize any existing installation of these OSs.
That is, when the installer apparently didn’t recognize install CDs, I attempted to install these old OSes to see if XP installer would recognize any of them. It didn’t.
To be clear, some trouble was unavoidable. I was installing an OS on a VM, not a real machine.
At any rate, the procedure that finally worked was to create an ISO of one of my old Windows CDs, Windows NT Workstation specifically, and mount that virtual CD in the VMware tools when asked by the installer, rather than mounting the real CD on my X4100 when the installer asked for it.
Go figure.
installation, vmware, x4100, xp