anyone get the PVSCSI driver working in (unsupported) XP?

[lukasware]

The pvscsi .INF file specifically excludes XP but supports Windows 2003. Like many

other drivers which work in both this drive might as well, if the .INF file was properly

modified. I've gotten it to recognize and install the driver but it will not start. It's possible

or probable that I did not modify the .INF correctly.

The inf file is in the "VMware Tools.msi" package and can be extracted using

uniextract. (also the other drivers can be extracted and a nice nlite-ed XP

disk can be made for Hardware Version 7 but that's another post)

I know XP is EOL this month but thought this might be useful for benchmarking.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Moved to Virtual Machine and Guest OS forum.

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[Atmos4 · Accepted solution]

If the driver is storport based (as opposed to scsi miniport) it'll only work on XP x64, storport is not supported in XP x86.

[lukasware]

Thanks Atmos4, I think you are right and here is the discussion in StorageReview

and the paper from Microsoft:

that has FOUR PAGES of details on the lmitations of the SCSIport driver, Overly

summarized as limited queueing, high overhead, Sequential I/O, high overhead for non-SCSI hardware,

and on and on. So it makes sense not to support scsiport since 32/64 bit versions of Win2K3, Win2K8

XP64 (which is based on W2K3) and Vista all support storport. The most popular OS (XP32) never had storport

backported. The scsiport limitations are a very good explanation of why Linux is so much faster on

the same hardware than Windows.