Testing IE Versions

I am updating this post to include a couple of other ways to test a website in multiple browser versions.

(1) https://spoon.net/browsers

Of the various methods I have tried, using spoon.net is by far the quickest and simplest way to run older browser versions (as well as many different browsers). It is simple to get up and running. It is also easy to debug web applications running on localhost (using IIS or Visual Studio's development web server). You will need to pay a small fee (~ $5/month), but that is well worth the time it saves.

(2) Windows XP Mode and Virtual PC

The following article explains how to use Windows XP Mode and Virtual PC to run IE6 and IE7:

http://www.sitepoint.com/ie6-ie7-ie8-win7-xp-mode/

It took an hour or two to get everything installed and configured, but it was fairly straight forward. I created a third XP virtual machine for IE8; so I can run IE6, IE7, and IE8 on my development machine. A couple of things to consider:
  (a) If you want to run more than one of the virtual machines simultaneously, you should rename each machine (from within the XP guest OS) to avoid NetBIOS naming conflicts
  (b) Since the browser is running in a virtual guest OS, it is not straight forward to access a web application running on localhost of the host OS. I am sure it can be done, but I have not yet take the time to figure it out.

(3) IETester:

IETester is a nifty tool for testing websites in various versions of Internet Explorer. It seems to work some of the time, but it crashed on my several times and did not seem to handle Javascript very well.

http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible.

Sitting quietly (only when powered off) under my desk is a classic desktop computer circa 1999. The machine served me well for many years. During its prime, the hardware donned various operating systems. The operating system currently installed is Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (used primarily for development and testing). I keep it around just in case I ever need to go back and find something I need (perhaps some old VB6 code ... which I needed recently).

Nowadays I have a habit of converting old physical machines to virtual machines for archiving. Even a 100 GB virtual machine takes up far less space than a physical machine. For some reason, I had never created the virtual equivalent of this old machine ... until now. This conversion process was a little different than most that I do because this machine had multiple physical drives each with multiple logical partitions.

I first installed VMware vCenter Converter on the machine and started the conversion process. Everything went smoothly until the final reconfiguration process (when Converter first attempts to boot the new virtual machine). The following error message terminated the conversion process:

FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible.

I did some searching and eventually found this discussion topic. The first response (IamTHEvilONE, 17-May-2010) contained the information that resolved my conversion error. I found the C:\boot.ini file on my physical machine and opened it up. Sure enough, it looked similar to:

timeout=30
default=signature(e6d6ab31)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
signature(e6d6ab31)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003, Standard" /fastdetect

I changed the "signature(e6d6ab31)" on each line to "multi(0)" (after making a backup copy of the file). After making the changes, it looked like this:

timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003, Standard" /fastdetect

With that change to the boot.ini file, I was able to successfully convert the physical machine to a virtual machine. Now I just need to run KillDisk on the drives, donate the hardware to a recycling program, and find something else to start collecting dust.