Ah, 'Foo'-ey!
Microsoft's Virtual PC guy, Ben Armstrong, has an unintentionally (I think) funny
blog entry detailing a reason your virtual machine (VM) may not start from a USB or other external drive. If your VM fails to fire up, you might get the message that "'Foo' failed to initialize." (Don't you hate it when that happens? "Doggone it, my Foo failed to initialize again!")
The cause is likely to be that the drive was formatted as FAT32 rather than NTFS, which Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor, requires for VMs. It's a security thing.
Here's my question: Why would a Hyper-V coder write an error message like this? Is he or she a fan of the rock group Foo Fighters? Is it a nickname? Hey, whatever the reason, I kinda like it. Beats those boring, cryptic messages you normally get, even if it has no meaning. So remember to make your external VM storage drives NTFS. In the immortal words of President Lincoln, "You can Foo some of the people some of the time..."
Posted by Keith Ward on 08/28/2008 at 12:48 PM