Of Repaving, Virtual PCs and Paying Attention

Well, it came time to repave my machine (as it always seems to do.) No sweat. I had all of my dev stuff on a VPC image. I even had the C partition going unused from a previous repaving.

So, I install XP + updates + firewall + virus scanner. All is well.

I installed VS2003, Office, etc, etc. All is well.

I mount my VPC iso and install. All is still well. I'm on a roll.

Now comes time to load my VPC image. Boom. Odd. It's complaining about some setting in the Virtual Machine. Maybe I constructed this one with a different amount of memory. Oh well, I'll just blow away the Virtual Machine .vmc file since it doesn't really hold all that much. All the good stuff is in the .vhd file anyway.

I create a New Virtual Machine and load my Virtual Hard Drive. Invalid format?!? Huh? It tells me to go through the XP recovery steps. Fine. {Getting a bit queesy now.}

After chugging along for hours (or so it seemed) it was recovered. Okay. Reboot the VPC and... Boom. UGH!

Only now do I finally notice that I've mounted the wrong ISO. I mounted the Connectix 5.2 VPC instead of VPC 2004. I'm an idiot. But now it's too late. I didn't think to enable Undo Disk before trying this. It's toast.

Nuts.

It's a damn good thing that I had all my source in VSS which I archived before the repave. Saved my ass it did.

The moral of the story. Pay attention dimwit or you might lose something permanently next time.

It's a good thing I didn't go into medicine: "Nurse, you did backup the patient like I asked right?"

[Listening to: Powerman5000 and Rob Zombie - Blast off to Nowhere]