I have written a few times here about different topics on virtual machine use. Here is a hint on how you might be able to take advantage of images distributed as Hyper-V virtual images, even though there are some issues when trying to boot from these images with a screen reader.
As far as I know and in my direct experience, if you try and use Hyper-V for virtual machine use, there is no audio support until the machine is fully configured and you are signed into a user account on the machine or at the login screen. This means you are not able to use Narrator for things such as OS install. This remains true whether you are installing the OS clean from an ISO file or using a vhd/vhdx hard drive file of sorts that already has the OS installed. In the second case, you still have to go through the last parts of setup for the out of box experience. If someone knows differently, please correct my information.
Recently I was in a situation where I needed to try something and an ISO file to use VMWare, my preferred virtualization solution wasn’t available to me. VMWare has native audio support from the start so you can boot from an ISO and use Narrator for OS install.
In my situation, the only thing I had available to me was the Hyper-V virtual hard drive file. I used sighted assistance the first time I tried working with the Hyper-V file to build my virtual machine. But later in the day, when such assistance wasn’t available and because it isn’t a long-term solution for doing this sort of stuff independently, the idea of converting the Hyper-V hard drive to another format came to me. I used a 3rd party free product called StarWind V2V Converter to convert the Hyper-V drive to a VMWare drive and it worked quite well.
The conversion itself took just a few minutes and as you would expect pretty much involved picking the source file, specifying a destination file and format and then running the conversion. The program works well enough with a screen reader and the conversion took less than two minutes.
Once I had the VMWare hard drive file, I created a new VM machine in VMWare, indicated I would install the OS later and then pointed the virtual machine to my converted hard drive file as the hard drive to use. I launched the virtual machine in VMWare and was delighted to hear Narrator come up to finish machine configuration.
Much as I wish it wasn’t the case, there is always that curiosity I suppose when you try these sorts of things as to whether you are going to get screen reader support or not.
In the spirit of convert it once, convert it twice, I also used this solution to get an ARM version of Windows running on my M1 MacBook Air. This is not a supported environment but there are Hyper-V images available from the Windows Insider program. I was able to download an image on a Windows computer, run the conversion and copy the resulting VMWare hard drive to the Mac and use the same basic technique of pointing the virtual machine to that image for the hard drive.
As I said, this is not a supported configuration and to get network and sound support in particular, I had to connect external hardware to the Mac. I used a USB to ethernet network device and a small USB sound card I keep around for situations like this. I did then get the insider build to run and was able to configure it with Narrator and use it on the M1 MacBook.
There very well may be other ways to accomplish all that I’ve described. I’m sharing my solutions in case others find yourself in a situation where you need to use a Hyper-V image and Hyper-V is not a workable solution.
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