In my efforts to get the haiku system working I discovered many people are having trouble and asking questions related to installing this system on MS VPC7 so I wrote down my procedure as best as I could.
A very simple way to get this working is to start with a VPC that has a working OS.
Windows:
Start your VPC Console and select the Windows OS you are going to use to install with. (Do not start the V-machine unless you need to clear a saved session and then make sure it is shutdown properly.) Click Settings, select the Hard Disk 2, or what ever hard disk you have that is unused (Current Value=None), and start the virtual Disk Wizard.
In the Virtual Hard Disk Wizard Click Next then Create a new virtual disk, next again, A virtual hard disk, and next again. Browse to the place you wish to store your Haiku Virtual Hard Drive, give the new drive a name and click Save. Click Next, Select the Dynamically Expanding option, no need to waist space unnecessarily click next, and set the virtual hard disk size to about 150mb, the drive will grow if you ad enough software or data files to cause it to do so. Now click finish and return to the VPC console-Settings window after the drive is finished building. Select the option to set Hard disk 2 and click browse, select the new drive you have just finished creating and click ok to close the settings window.
Now start your Windows VPC and login.
In your vpc, download and extract the daily image haiku.img file from the .bz2 file using something like 7-zip (http://www.7-zip.org/). I will be using c:\temp for the working directory.
You will need DD for windows, available free @ http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.5.zip I extracted it into my system32 directory for easy access.
Open a command prompt (Start-> Run->cmd.exe) and run: dd –list this will return a list of devices attached to your machine which dd can use. If your new drive is connected to VPC disk 2 then you should see a device listing of \?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 if so then we are ok so far.
Now run: dd if=c:\temp\haiku.image of=\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 --progress
This will copy the image to the drive formatting the file system as it dos so, if you leave off the –progress part it will still work but will look like it is locked up.
Once this is finished shut down the windows V-machine completely and click on the settings again. This time we want to remove the assignment of our new drive to hard Disk 2 and close the settings window.
Now in the VPC Console select New to create a new VPC. Click Next, Select Create a virtual machine, click next, browse to the location you wish to keep it and give it a name, click Save and next again. Set OS to Other and click next again, set the amount of ram you wish to allow the system to use and click next again. Select the option to use an existing virtual hard disk and click next, browse to and select the one we just finished creating. You can enable the undo disk if it suites you or not as you like, but you still have to click next (yet again). We have now created our Haiku VPC and are ready to give it a test run, so have at it and best of luck to you.
The Linux VPC way is almost exactly the same except you use the Linux version of dd and bz2 to unzip and write the drive image.