Today was not a fun day.  Among the many tasks that I had to accomplish my primary development virtual machine decided to barf on me.  The system would boot but then the moment I attempted to run VS and load a project it would 'blink' off and reboot.  It did this twice and then decided to run a CHKDSK at the third boot.  This found several invalid file chains and ended up 'restoring' several files.

At this point, the OS wouldn't even boot, saying that the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG directory was missing.  Great!  My next step was to run a repair from the Windows XP boot disk.  This ran fine (for a while) until it eventually crashed with an invalid memory address read.

The rest of my day was spent attempting to get my development files off of the VPC so I could move over (a.k.a., rebuild) another.  That, in and of itself, isn't a big deal - I have several base images to work with so I'm not worried.  Getting the files off of a VPC image turned out to be non-trivial.  There may be better ways to do this (and I'm open to thoughts), but here's what I did:

1. Create a secondary, blank VHD (virtual hard drive).  I had to do this because VPC wouldn't let me mount a non-CD/DVD/ISO drive within the image and I couldn't share a folder between the VM and the host machine.
2. Boot the VPC to the command prompt (I used an old Win98 disk cause it was laying around).
3. FDISK to create a partition on the VHD.
4. Boot to the XP Recovery Console (via the XP boot disk) - a step which we'll soon see was a waste of time.
5. FORMAT D:\ /FS:NTFS
6. At this point, I wanted to copy my ~\dev directory to the new VHD.  Well, as it turns out the XP Recovery Console doesn't allow XCOPY (even when referenced directly in the c:\windows\system32 folder) !! Even then, COPY doesn't allow wildcards nor directory copying !!  This completely, utterly baffles me.
7. I then remembered my best friend in boot-time travails: Windows PE (Pre-installation Environment) Server Edition: boot to WinPE.
8. Once I booted up to PE it was a cakewalk.  It's a good thing too, because manually copying 2490 files manually (one by one due to lack of wildcards in NTRC) would have been a nightmare.

Well, now I'm back up and running, but what a nightmare.