Resize Virtual Hard Disk 0 comments

1. Booted up using the SYSRECCD from http://www.sysresccd.org
2. Executed 'fdisk -l' to see both the partitioned drive and the unpartitioned drive
3. Executed 'dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb' (may be sda and sdb)

4. Executed 'fdisk -l' which now showed hdb as a partitioned drive

5. Rebooted
5. Used gparted to resize the first parttion to use the full 10GB disk
7. Booted up to windows again and as expected it ran a disk check (do not!!! stop it)

My New Preferred Free Virtualization Software 0 comments

After spending several days trying to get Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1 working properly on a HP laptop, I (reluctantly) tried Sun's VirtualBox. Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1 was pretty much unusable. The mouse in the guest OS would not move fluidly. Each action was pretty slow. I disabled SpeedStep, enabled background threads, tried to optimize the guest OS, turn off everything on the host OS, but nothing worked. To my amazement, Sun's VirtualBox just worked they way I expected and experienced Microsoft's product on a desktop. Now, I am still a fan of VMWare's products, but sometimes a free alternative suffices. Sun's product also has builtin support for guest additions on many different OS's without searching for them. My only beef (and a small one) with VirtualBox is that you can't paste into the guest OS without installing the guest additions.