{"id":446,"date":"2009-09-20T23:55:04","date_gmt":"2009-09-21T03:55:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/?p=446"},"modified":"2009-09-20T23:55:04","modified_gmt":"2009-09-21T03:55:04","slug":"growing-a-windowsxp-vmware-guestos-in-ubuntu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/2009\/growing-a-windowsxp-vmware-guestos-in-ubuntu\/","title":{"rendered":"Growing a WindowsXP VMWare GuestOS in Ubuntu"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"vmware_ubuntu\"<\/a>My desktop at home is based on Ubuntu<\/a> and generally its a good end user experience.\u00a0 The bonus to running Linux<\/a> is it gives me a unix<\/a> system to hack around with and I avoid some of the malware<\/a> nonsense the plagues the much more popular Windows<\/a> operating system.\u00a0 Of course, Linux is a poor second cousin and there is a lot of software that is only for Windows.\u00a0 The suite of work-alike applications under Linux is improving, but most people can’t quite get away from Windows entirely.<\/p>\n

For my part, one of the key applications is iTunes<\/a>.\u00a0 Sure you can sort of get by with pure Linux, buts its still pretty messy.\u00a0 Running the real application is much easier.\u00a0 There are a few other less frequently used applications that require me to have a Windows install around too.<\/p>\n

Quite some time ago, I took a physical install of WindowsXP Home and virtualized it to run under VMWare Player<\/a> (you can also choose to use VMWare Server<\/a>).\u00a0 I’ve lost track of the specific steps I did, but the following how to<\/a> seems to cover basically what I did.\u00a0 One footnote to this process is that it appears to Windows as if you’ve changed the hardware significantly enough to require revalidation of your license – this shouldn’t be a big deal if you’ve got a legitimate copy.<\/p>\n

Now back then, I figured that a 14Gb disk would be plenty of space for Windows.\u00a0 (Ok, stop laughing now).\u00a0 So this worked fine for a couple of years, but the cruft has built up to the point where I’m getting regular low disk warnings in my WindowsXP image.\u00a0 Time to fix it.<\/p>\n

You’ll need to get a copy of VMWare Server.\u00a0 This is a free download, but requires a registration that gives you a free key to run it.\u00a0 You actually don’t need the key – as we only need one utility out of the archive:\u00a0 vmware-vdiskmanager<\/code>.\u00a0 This will allow us to resize the .vmdk file – which will take a little while.<\/p>\n


\n.\/vmware-vdiskmanager -x 36Gb WindowsXP.vmdk<\/code><\/p>\n

The vmware server archive also contains another very useful tool: vmware-mount<\/code>.\u00a0 This allows you to mount your vmware disk and access the NTFS<\/a> partitions under Linux.\u00a0 Very nice for moving data in or out of your virtualized Windows machine.<\/p>\n

I need to credit the blog post<\/a> which pointed me at the vmware-vdiskmanager, but it goes on to talk about using the Windows administration tools to change the type of the disk from basic to dynamic.\u00a0 This is a feature not available in XP Home<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The .vmdk file represents the raw disk, so we’ve now got more drive space avilable but the Windows partition is still stuck at 14Gb.\u00a0 No problem, the Ubuntu live CD contains a copy of GParted which can resize NTFS for us.\u00a0 We need to edit the .vmx file to add the .iso file and boot from it.<\/p>\n

ide0:0.present = \"TRUE\"
\nide0:0.fileName = \"\/MyData\/ISOs\/ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso\"
\nide0:0.deviceType = \"cdrom-image\"<\/code><\/p>\n

I did also have to fiddle with the VMWare BIOS (F2 on boot) to enable booting from the CDRom.\u00a0 You may or may not need to do this step.<\/p>\n

Once you have the Ubuntu Live CD running, run the partition editor under System->Adminstration->Partition Editor.\u00a0 This is GParted and its got a pretty friendly graphical UI.\u00a0 It may take some time to apply the change.<\/p>\n

\"WindowsXP_Growing\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Once you are done, you need to re-edit your .vmx file to remove the .iso and boot Windows once again.\u00a0 Don’t Panic.\u00a0 Windows will detect that there is something amiss on your file system and want to run a check \/ repair on it.\u00a0 This is normal.\u00a0 Let it run through this process, it is a one time fix up and you’ll boot clean afterwards.<\/p>\n

\"WindowsXP-Chkdsk\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Start to end it takes a couple of hours, but most of that is waiting for longish disk operations.\u00a0 Worth it to now have plenty of drive space available for my Windows VMware image.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My desktop at home is based on Ubuntu and generally its a good end user experience.\u00a0 The bonus to running Linux is it gives me a unix system to hack around with and I avoid some of the malware nonsense the plagues the much more popular Windows operating system.\u00a0 Of course, Linux is a poor … Continue reading “Growing a WindowsXP VMWare GuestOS in Ubuntu”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-how-to"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":452,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions\/452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lowtek.ca\/roo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}