I have spent the last few days trying to install Visual Studio 2008 a.k.a. Orcas Beta 2. The download page is here.

The basic idea is that you download a virtual machine that has both the OS (Windows Server 2003) and Orcas preloaded. First, you download a base file called VSCTPBase.exe, which you unpack to get a virtual hard drive. Then, you download 7 RAR files. The first one is self extracting and extracts itself and the rest of them, and then builds a differencing disk which is added to the initial virtual hard drive to create the final virtual drive. At least, that was the theory!

As the whole setup uses a lot of space, and I am almost out of space (as usual) on my laptop, I borrowed a 300 Gb external disk from work to put the VPC on. I downloaded the files mentioned above onto that disk. I then unpacked the base image, and started unpacking the 7 RARS. Well - somewhere in the middle of the third one, I get an error message saying

"Write error in the file OrcasBeta2_VSTS.vhd. Probably the disk is full."

Not! I had about 250 Gb free on the disk. OrcasBeta2_VSTS.vhd is the differencing disk that was being merged from the RARS. So, I scratched my head, googled, couldn't find anyone else with the same problem, tried downloading the file again, rebooted, tried again, sacrificed a goat. No luck.

So I tried searching for the message above as "Write error in the file" and "Probably the disk is full." Now I got lots of hits, this seems to happen a lot to people. Finally, I stumbled across a post saying that there is a file size limit on FAT32 volumes, somewhere around 4Gb.

FAT32? I had forgotten about that evil stuff, along with win.ini, config.sys, thunking, himem, edlin, floppy disks and gorilla.bas! And sure enough, the 300Gb external drive was formatted as FAT32. Duh!

So, a quick command brought my external I: drive out of the bronze age:

convert I:/FS:NTFS 

And now the extraction worked.

Can you believe that? Poor Microsoft trying to get it's developers to beta test their latest and greatest development tools, and you run into FAT32! Talk about a blast from the past. Tonight I will dream nightmares about 640K memory limits and 16 bit operating systems... and the turbo button.