A solution to Vista RC 2 install error

Posted: 21.10.2006 8.31.29 (EET/GMT+2)

Last week, I tried installing Windows Vista RC 2 to my PC, but it failed under VMware Workstation because of a missing CD/DVD driver, or at least so the error message said. Today I had more time to test, and I found a solution to my problem by using Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 (now free) instead.

However, even using Virtual PC didn't directly solve the problem, but I got around the problem and wanted to share my findings. Firstly, I had downloaded the Vista RC 2 .ISO image from MSDN, and since (unlike VMware) Virtual PC doesn't support using DVD .ISO images directly, I had to burn the .ISO image to a DVD+RW disc. Then, I fired up a Virtual PC virtual machine, only to find out that Vista failed to install:

Windows cannot open the required file D:\Sources\Install.wim. The file may be corrupt
or missing. Make sure all files required for installation are available, and
restart the installation. Error code: 0x80070570.

Oh well! My first thought was that I would either have a corrupted .ISO image download, or a corrupted DVD burn. The latter seemed more likely, so I reburned the DVD, but that didn't help. Since I didn't want to wait another 8 hours to download the .ISO image again, I instead went browsing for the error message on TechNet forums, and found that there's a nifty little utility called "Virtual CD-ROM", a freebie written by Microsoft, and only 32 KB in size.

Now, this tool does what it promises. It's a bit obscure to use, but you get a ReadMe file with the instructions. The files you need are (in addition to the instructions, that is) VCdControlTool.exe and VCdRom.sys. These very small files (the device driver is only 9 KB!) are downloadable from Microsoft's web site. I don't know if there's a link available that isn't directly to the EXE file, and the only place on Microsoft's web site I could find a reference to this utility was in the KB article 916902.

Now, by downloading this utility and following the instructions (the utility isn't something what I would call really easy), I could mount a virtual CD drive from my MSDN .ISO image, and then use that as the physical CD/DVD drive for Virtual PC. And suddenly, I could easily install Vista Release Candidate 2. Rock on!