Had something interesting happen to me today. I was installing the Whidbey Beta 1 Refresh on a new VPC machine when I happened to look at the file system and see a file with a .v01 extension. In the months since I've been using VPC I've not seen that file extension before, so naturally curiosity got the best of me and I Googled for it. The first result is from someone at Microsoft who ran into this issue a ways back and talks about why VPC created this file:
“When I received the USB drive it was preformated FAT32 and ready to go. I created the .vhd, loaded it up and was ready to rock and roll. Over time the .vhd file grew larger than the 4Gb FAT32 limit and VPC quite conveniently created a separate file with the extra information in it (the extension was v01).“
This is exactly what I ran into today. The external USB 2.0 hard drive I bought a couple months ago was preformated in FAT32 (I never bothered to check it), so during the install of the Beta 1 refresh it ran over the 4GB limit of FAT32 and created the .v01 file automatically. The .v01 file (or .v02, .v03, etc if you had a VPC image that size) is essentially a split hard drive file. Because of this, when you go to move the normal .vhd file, you MUST move the .v01 file along with it or you will get a “Disk Read Error” the next time you fire up that VPC image. See the aforementioned post for a tip on merging the split files.
So no big deal, but something I thought I'd pass along. And for those who know me best, yes, I will be reformatting my external hard drive in NTFS to prevent this in the future :-)
Print | posted on Saturday, December 11, 2004 4:29 PM