HI, Dmitry,

I've read through all the messages on this topic, and wanted to throw in my 2 cents.

First, you mentioned you had 4 GB of memory, which should be at least decent enough to run a VM. However, I didn't see anything about your processor speed or hard drive speed. Are you running a laptop or desktop? Reason for asking - a good number of laptops have hard drives with spin rates of 5400 rpm. That will definitely affect VM performance negatively. You may want to find out if your drive is a 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm drive. (I'll admit there have been some design changes made in more recent ATA 5400 rpm drives that bridge the speed gap - but in general, I would recommend running on a 7200 rpm drive)

Second - does your machine support two hard disks? You will get faster performance (at least measurably and maybe significantly) if the VM image is on a 2nd internal drive.

Related...I know someone who stores a VM on an external eSata drive and gets good performance, certainly much better than a USB external drive.

Third - no disrespect to Microsoft, but I am a much bigger fan of Sun VirtualBox, as opposed to either Virtual PC or even VMWare. If you're running a Core 2 Duo, you can tell VirtualBox how many processors to use (maybe you can with Virtual PC, but I'm not sure).

Fourth - in reading some of your exchanges with Craig, it does sound like you need to revisit your VM configurations. There "shouldn't" be any trouble recognizing other drives. Also, how many RAM are you allocating to the VM? If you have 4 GB total, I would probably allocate in the neighborhood of 1.6 to 1.8 GB of RAM for the VM. Mileage will vary, but I've found that giving a VM slightly less than 50% of your total memory is the "sweet spot".

Fifth....at the risk of tossing a huge monkey wrench into things...on my development laptop, my drive was big enough to partition into two drives. One of my drives boots into Windows 7 and the other drive boots into Windows Server. If you have a big enough hard drive, you might want to consider that approach. (I am fortunate that I have a fast laptop that reboots very quickly)

Hope this helps....
Kevin