Willing wheels

If you want to test your website on IE6 & IE7  (with truly installed Internet Explorer – not some hacked versions), there is a good news: microsoft has released virtual disk ready just for this.

And even better, you can run them on Virtualbox!

I found a great tutorial on how to have them work in virtualbox: http://morecowbell.net.au/2009/03/internet-explorer-application-compatibility-vpc-images-under-virtualbox/

Contrary to earlier versions, now virtualbox (> v2.2) handles natively .vhd (microsoft virtual pc) format. Problem is that when I tried to run .vhd files retrieved from microsoft.com, it ended up in a blue-screen with vm reboot. Above mentionned tutorial helped a lot to fix this issue.

Here are the steps:

1. go to microsoft.com to download .vhd files you’re interested into: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en
2. once you have downloaded the file, execute them to extract them, you will have a folder with the .vhd file
3. create your corresponding Virtual Machine on virtualbox (don’t forget to allow sufficient memory, windows is resource hungry)
4. now is the tricky part:
   1. start your VM
   2. keep pressing F8 while VM is booting (while on Sun splashscreen – before windows starts to load)
   3. if you did it well, you should now have a menu => select “safe mode”
   4. once safe mode is loaded, click on OK and ignore all the “missing driver” windows
   5. click on start / run => enter “cmd” and click on execute
   6. now in the black screen, enter: “sc config Processor start= disabled” + hit enter (a successful message should reward you)
   7. restart windows
5. make virtualbox guest applications accessible: on virtualbox window of your running VM, click on /devices/mount/cd dvd-rom image + select corresponding .iso file
6. now install virtualbox guest applications (go to D:\ in windows and double click on virtualbox_windows_guestapplications or so)
   1. here again it’s tricky. Drivers were not correctly installed on my xp box. => open another command prompt (/start/run: “cmd”) and enter : D:\VBoxWindowsAdditions-x86 /extract /D=C:\Drivers
      this should extract
   2. restart windows xp
   3. when windows will ask for PCI ethernet device driver, make it point to C:\Drivers\x86\Network\AMD

In my case, it asked for usb drivers too. Having activated network driver, I connected to the internet and updated windows so it could find these drivers but this did not work. If your xp install is asking for OCH usb2 controller driver (as well as AC’97 Intel 82801 AA audio driver too) or Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM USB Universal Host Controller and if you have found a solution, I am highly interested. Please feel free to share.
[UPDATE]: I finally found a solution, see virtualboxed xp asking for usb drivers

WARNING: when updating windows, make sure to check what update windows is installing, you may endup with an update of IE to IE8 => which would completely screw the purpose of using these virtualization files for testing websites under IE6 & IE7!

UUID problem => from .vhd to .vdi conversion

To avoid UUID problem (all .vhd having the same UUID, it’s currently not possible to have the three of them present in VirtualBox menu at the same time => you need to unlock & remove one to add another => extremely annoying), I simply converted the files into their .vdi counterpart.

To do this, please read this post: convert .vhd (virtualpc) file to .vdi (virtualbox) format

sources

• http://morecowbell.net.au/2009/03/internet-explorer-application-compatibility-vpc-images-under-virtualbox/
• http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en page where to download .vhd files
• http://www.abdevelopment.ca/blog/running-microsofts-ie-application-compatibility-images-virtualbox other great post on xp .vhd with virtualbox
• http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=2fcde6ce-b5fb-4488-8c50-fe22559d164e&displayLang=en just-in case

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 7:19 pm and is filed under virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.