Jelle Druyts

I've been trying to get the WinHEC build of Longhorn installed but to no avail... Did anyone get it up and running on a Dell Latitude D600?

I run the setup (from within Windows XP) to install it onto a freshly formatted partition, and I get up to the part where it's supposed to start copying files onto the partition. At least I suspect so, because I get "An error occurred while copying files".

Now I've read in the readme (I actually read those on anything other than RTM builds nowadays) that the hard disk driver must be supported - "or else"... (Or else what? I don't know. It probably throws funky "cannot copy" errors in your face, right?) Luckily, you can insert a floppy disk containing drivers at some time during the setup process if your hard disk is not supported.

Well, 'luckily' is a bit of an overstatement. A floppy disk? Let me sketch that into its right context here: I'm installing Windows Longhorn, a true 21st-century OS with vector graphics, a filesystem backed by a relational database, an extensible item store, a polyglot communication stack, all programmable with the obiquitous .NET runtime, and (how conveniently) a brandnew driver model - and it's asking me for a stone age floppy disk? Even if I had a floppy drive for my laptop (which I don't), I certainly wouldn't have any driver disks to feed it with. It's kind of like "here's that ftp server with the zipped 19GB pr0n collection you asked for, but it only has a 56K modem and there's 178 users before you".

Anyway. It's alpha. Years from shipping. A lot can change. (Read: change this!)

So with that option out of the way, I tried installing it onto a new VirtualPC. Unfortunately, you can't mount a directory (the one containing the setup files) as a CD in VirtualPC. So I made an ISO out of the lot and mounted that, but I can't get VirtualPC to boot it (how do you make a bootable cd?)... It would be nice if VirtualPC could map the virtual drive onto the local filesystem (kind of like the nifty Shared Folders, but then backwards) so I could try installing it straight onto that, but there's no way of accessing the virtual drive straight from the host system as far as I know.

Alas, so far nothing worked. No Longhorn for me. If anybody has any ideas, be sure to let me know!