Lenny is the latest Debian release. I did build a virtual machine on my Vista 64 bits pc starting with the net installer cd. It refused to boot but adding noapic nolapic and noreplace-paravirt to the boot command did the trick. Put the vhd on the usb drive, transported it through the harse winterweather to the office. Picked a PC from the storage. It had a fresh company approved domain joined Windows XP SP2 image on it. Offcourse it was a 32 bits machine.
Installed VPC 2007 SP1, copied the VHD, created a new virtual machine, attached the vhd, booted and....
Kernel Panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill the idle task!
...just after the bootimage started.
Retried... added vga=771...added vesa... wondered if 64 bits virtual hard drives are different....googled...found remarks about faulty memory (in a vpc?). Changed to my laptop, same issue. Downloaded a fresh iso from Debian, same issue. This is driving a man crazy. It used to work....
I finally googled the address of the instrcution pointer: EIP: [<c01012d0>] and that brought me by the bugs in the P2 processor with regard to the i387 or floating point processor. In the kernel documentation looked up the kernel-parameters and searched for any no.... regarding the fpu.
The first was no387. That did bring the boot further in the process but the Debian kernel didn't had the math emulation compiled in so that failed there
The next was nofxsr. Hurray, that worked! Debian Lenny is now working in my VPC on both Intel x64 cpu and good old Intel x32 cpu.
Lesson learned:
The cpu is not virtualized in VPC2007 (as opposed to the networkcard and video card)
Always Google for the EIP address in case of kernel panic.