Mac Forum / Applications / Virtual PC / March 2005

If you want to do a clean install then this means you'll possibly be
wanting to erase your Mac's drive before installing the system.
Therefore, make sure you copy your VPC Windows disk image file to a DVD
or another network location via firewire or ethernet.

Your entire Windows system will be intact when you return it to your
newly installed system and open it in VPC.

Or the Tiger installer will probably include a feature similar to that
in Panther to allow you to select the option of archiving your old
system and installing the new system. This will carry your user
information over to the new system along with your files and VPC Windows
disk image.

Bear in mind that VPC 7.x may need an update once Tiger is released to
make it work properly.

Hope this helps! bill

What do you mean by backing up? With VPC6 (and I assume VPC7) you need
only backup the image file  (which might be a few Gb in size - a good
case for a Superdrive). I run Win98 under VPC6 and the image file path is:
<home>: Documents: Virtual PC List: Windows 98.vpc6

On several occasions I have restored the backup file and VPC6 has worked
without problems. Once again I recommend that you create a d: drive for
your data so that the c: drive image file does not grow to an
unmanageable size:
http://www4.tpgi.com.au/users/aoaug/mac_osx.html#d-drive
Dont keep all your eggs in one basket, especially if the handle is
likely to break!

Regarding OS X upgrades - I recently restored OS X after my Quicktime
program got corrupted (it is built into OS X). I started from the
original Jaguar system disk and went through the various upgrades to
10.3.8. All applications were retained during this process and seem to
work well. This ability to restore the OS but retain applications, and
their configurations, is a wonderful feature of OS X. I will likely use
the upgrade path when Tiger is released. Of course a clean install would
be desirable, if I had the time and patience (but if I had them I would
still be using a Windows PC!).

Michael Paine

I'm just curious, but have you considered doing an "Archive"
installation of Tiger rather than a "clean install"? An archive install
preserves your applications and documents while installing a new system
(be it your exisitng system or a newer version such as Tiger). Of
course, I could be toally off the mark, but it's just a thought.

Best of luck!

One thing that comes to mind is whether the two kernel
extensions:

 VirtualPCOSServices
 VirtualPCNetworking

will actually work in Tiger.  If these two extensions don't work
with the new kernel, then Virtual PC will never start.

Does Microsoft have anything to say about this?  Probably not!

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All you would have to do is backup the Virtual PC List Folder that contains
your Windows XP machine and then import it by File > Import > Import
Previous Version.

If that doesn't work when you reinstall you would have to do Ctrl+Click and
schoose Show Package Contents and drag the Windows XP image (looks like a
hardrive) to your Virtual PC List folder.