How to fix the "Cannot attach the virtual hard disk ..."

… to the virtual machine.  Check the values provided and try again.” error
Windows Virtual PC: Cannot attach the virtual hard disk to the virtual machine.  Check the values provided and try again.

It sucks as an error message.  Would it take too much programming effort to make it more meaningful Virtual PC team?

What does it mean?

It means you have a Virtual Hard Disk file larger than 127.5GB.  Which Virtual PC does not support.
You might have created this with the Microsoft Disk2VHD tool.
To confirm the “disk is too big” problem, open the Settings on an existing Virtual PC, and try to attach the drive:
The virtual hard disk image ... is too large for the IDE bus.  Make sure that all virtual had disk images connected to the IDE bus are not greater than 127.5GB

In other words, we’ve captured a 160GB hard disk, and Virtual PC won’t let us use it.

But we can fix it, it’s a two step process

First we use DiskPart, and then we use VHD Resizer.

(Click here to continue reading How to fix the “Cannot attach the virtual hard disk …”)

Tape backup, reliable? Never ever!

  Or how tape backups have failed my customers over the years, and wasted our collective time, because of customer stupidity.

Melted tapes The school which stored their entire backup tape set next to their server. One office fire later, “No, we can’t restore your melted tapes.” Old tapes The schools which refused to [...]

USB to ISA adapter board

Got an old PC which you cannot replace because it’s got a specialised ISA Adapter board in it?

ISA, dear reader, was introduced in 1981, with the original IBM PC.  By 2000, ISA was a dead standard.

I remember one of my customers had a stack of 80386 systems piled in a corner.  [...]

"… concerned about the heating of external drives …"

“I’m concerned about the heating of external drives because many of these little enclosures provide no active air flow across the drive.”, opines Steve Gibson.

And in the field of hard disk maintenance, he would have to be the expert.  SpinRite is the result of his knowledge in the field.

My Seagate FreeAgent Classic [...]

Computer Hardware Poster

Everyone I’ve shared this poster:

with, has said, “Where did you get it?”

Right here: sonic84.com and sonic84 @ deviantart.com

[...]

“I might be able to beat this up into a very good yarn”

I was discussing the poor state of print media journalism, the other day over a drink, with one of the blokes that I work with.

Since it’s Christmas and all, here’s a Nicholson animation movie which sums up it up.

(click on the picture for the movie)

[...]

"… No Terminal Server License Servers available …"

Strangely enough, I see this error occasionally when I connect to our corporate Citrix server farm.  Googling for the answer, I found Microsoft’s answer, which was less than helpful.

As my (Citrix) server administrators are only two desks away, I asked

“What gives???”

Windows does that, the fix is to delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing [...]

It’s a new BlackBerry Bold (the 9700).

So Telstra Australia have finally released the BlackBerry Bold 9700.  And if you loved the BlackBerry Curve 8300 series, you’ll love the new Bold.

If you have a BlackBerry Bold 9000, you’ll love it not as much.  That’ll be because the 9700 is a 9000 in a smaller package. And you Curve users?  [...]

Internet Explorer has issues with session cookies, fancy that.

The problem was reported thus.

Internet Explorer is not storing session cookies for XYZ website.  The session cookies are stored when we use Firefox.

Two hours later, I can tell you that:

I learnt more about web cookies than I will ever need to know again. Firefox does things differently to Internet Explorer.

Gentle [...]

Generic PC Found

When creating a desktop operating system install, we’ll often have a "computer specific” section, where we’ll install particular software for particular PCs.  For example, we would install fingerprint scanning software on those Lenovo laptops which had a fingerprint scanner built in.

But what if we’d detected a PC we don’t know about?

Throw up [...]