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.

Virtual PC 2007 slow on laptop 0 comments

From http://vdachev.net/2008/12/02/virtual-pc-2007-on-a-laptop/

Add <enable_idle_thread type="boolean">true </enable_idle_thread>

to the <virtual_machines> section in the options.xml file located in %userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Virtual PC

From Installing Ubuntu 9.04 on Virtual PC 2007 SP1

Boot Ubuntu 9.04 up. On the first screen, choose [English].
Then press [F4] and select [Safe Graphics].
Then press [F6], but do not select any option. Instead press [Escape] and it will allow you to change the command line. Remove the option "quiet splash --" and replace it with "vga=791 noreplace-paravirt" instead.
Press [Enter] to start the installation.

I had to use a lower resolution to get it to work.

vga=788 noreplace-paravirt xforcevesa noacpi

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_BIOS_Extensions#Linux_video_mode_numbers

VM Additions are at

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bf12642f-77dc-4d45-ae4e-e1b05e0a2674&DisplayLang=en