So because I have to keep up with the latest stuff, I took the plunge this weekend and installed Windows 7 beta on top of one of my development machines. I already had it on my laptop and it seemed fairly stable and my dev environment on my laptop was working fine, so I decided to give it an acid test and put in on one of my main dev machines (the one I am using for Azure development).

My first adventure in Windows 7 (and I was expecting them, it is a beta after all) was something has gone wrong with my SQL Server 2008 installation.  It is not possible to View the properties of a database.

gives an error of:

Well this problem doesn’t happen on my laptop but it is definitely here on my dev machine.  So after Googleing it, which gave me a whole bunch of links to this problem in SQL Server 2005; none of which helped me fix it, I decided I was just going to first try a repair, and than if that didn’t work, uninstall and reinstall it.  But my SQL 2008 server disk is missing from my msdn packet (and that bothers me also, but one problem at a time).  No problem, I’ll just download the iso from msdn and use it from there.  But wait, Windows 7 doesn’t like my usual tool for mounting iso images (and I don’t feel like wasting the time to burn dvds each time I have an ISO image).  I usually use Daemon Tools but in Win 7 they cause BSOD!!!!

Not good,  Which brings us to the subject of today’s blog post (and you thought it was about SQL 2008 having problems on Windows 7).  An ISO mount utility that will work on Windows 7, may I suggest SlySoft Virtual Clone Drive.  Found this utility after a Google (and how did we ever get by before google?) search.  It has some minor problems / issues, but nothing that isn’t workaroundable.

Now off to see if I can repair the SQL 2008