Creating a new virtual server

I already have a virtual hard disk with Windows Server 2003 installed that runs on Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007. One major issue with my current OS image is the lack of support for USB drivers and sound drivers. Despite repeated efforts, the sound drivers on VPC simply fail to work. I tried googling, but I could not find anything useful.



And since it’s a virtual machine, there are no specific drivers that I could install to get this thing to work. I found something called Virtual Machine Additions in MS VPC, which I assumed would be something similar to VMWare Tools.

The funny thing is that there is no indication of any change, during or after the installation of VM Additions. The sound just would not work.
I had enough of MS VPC, and I decided to do a fresh installation, this time on VMWare. The other major reason for doing this is that I really want a fresh and lean server VM where I can install all the stuff I want; and doing this on the already bloated VHD wasn’t a good idea.
One problem though: I do not have a CD of the Windows 2003 Server; but instead I have the whole setup in the form of a folder hierarchy.



What I needed now is an ISO image of the setup that I can use to boot up my virtual machine. Whats more, I needed a bootable CD. I thought I could do this using Nero 7. Ah, but Murphy’s law: the installation of Nero 7 on my machine is from the CD that came free with my SONY DVD writer, and Nero did not provide me a copy of Nero Burning ROM in the disc. So I could not create a bootable ISO. So I looked for a free software that will serve my purpose. I found CDBurnerXP. I found this to be a neat tool which gave me an option of creating ISO images and bootable discs.

Now, before I could create a bootable ISO, I needed a boot image which I downloaded after performing a google search (don’t remember where I got it from, but there are many available online and links to these are provided by the numerous guides). This boot image that I used was called boot.ima, which was a small file 2 KB in size.
To specify that you want to create a bootable disc, click on disc-> boot options:



Click on “make disc bootable”. Select the path to the boot image. Set the emulation type to none. Keep the Load segment as it is, and set the sector count to 4. Select “Disable ISO version number extension(;1)”, and click OK. Click file -> save compilation as ISO file, and create ISO.
That’s all I needed. I created a new virtual machine with VMware, and made it point to the ISO file I just created so that it could boot up from the ISO.



That’s it; I fired up the VM, and it booted from the ISO. I continued with the OS installation as usual. After that was done, I logged into the OS as admin, and what do I see? The sound doesn’t work. I installed VMWare tools and it showed that audio is enabled, but the OS in my VM was simply not able to play any sounds except for the system sounds. This time I opened device manager and chose the option of automatically installing drivers from Windows updates, and it downloaded the required drivers. After a reboot, when I started the machine again, I heard the sweet sound of windows startup.