Microsoft Windows Vista RC1 and VMware


If you try to install the last Microsoft Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 released on 7 september 2006 into a virtual machine created with VMware 5.5.2 the installation begins and it hangs at "Windows is loading files".

This is due to a bug of the video drivers of this release of Vista.

This is the solution:
  1. After the creation if a empty virtual machine edit the .vmx configuration file and add the following lines:
    svga.maxWidth = "640"
    svga.maxHeight = "480"
  2. When the setup of Vista is complete you have to install the VMware Tools
  3. Remove the previous added lines
After the last step you will not see anything during the bootstrap (only some strange lines) until the display of the logon mask.

After the logon you can setup the screen resolution at the dimension desired.