Can a virtual disc be installed to hard drive?

I have a VM that I worked hard to create (XP Media Center Edition), it is the trickiest install of Windows that I've done, which is why I did it as a VM. It took a few times to get it right, putting the first disc in, then the second, then it wants a XP Pro SP2 disc for some more files. Took a day to get it right.

Anyway, now that I have it right, and backed up with Macurim Reflect, can this virtual disc be done as a regular install, using the backup that I created?

The reason that this is in off topic is because it doesn't involve Windows 7, although the same principle could apply to virtual install of 7.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Cat

There's no reason why you can't restore a backup made within the virtual environment to your hard drive - however you'll probably get problems with drivers changing and so on, so I'm not sure how the OS will respond. You may need to boot in to safe mode and sort out the driver issues before being able to boot normally.

I'd normally just try a fresh install where possible

It didn't work out for me, I had to do a clean install (which I'm glad I did now). XP Media Center Edition is a challenging install, however I have it down pat now. I simply formatted XP Pro, and installed the Media Center Edition. It's really much the same OS as XP Pro, with a few enhancements that really makes your screen look good and colorful, it looks much better than the regular XP versions do.

It makes me wonder why this OS wasn't a success, I wasn't even aware of it, until becoming a TechNet subscriber.

Unfortunately, most pre-XP OS's are no longer available for download, per some agreement with Sun (Oracle). There were a couple more that I was interested in, especially Windows NT 4.0 & 98. Guess I'll have to purchase them on eBay.

Thanks for your response, Ian! Good to hear from you again.

Cat