Linux – My Thought Spot

Creating Virtual Windows

Ever since I got my current notebook computer (over three years ago), I have wanted to install Windows into a virtual machine. A virtual machine is a computer environment that runs inside of another operating system. For example, my main computer operating system is Linux. With a virtual machine installed inside of Linux I can run another operating system as if I had an extra computer. However, because I was not sure on how to set up a virtual machine I have continued to dual boot between Linux and Windows. This means that each time I turn on my computer I have to decide which operating system I want to use. I have just a couple of programs that I use in Windows that won’t work in Linux and therefore I have continued to dual boot just to run those programs.

Last weekend I finally decided to tackle the task of installing Windows into a virtual machine. And by doing this, I would also free up 150 GB of hard drive space that had been dedicated to my Windows installation. To get started I needed to do a complete backup of Windows and Linux. After doing a standard backup, I then cloned each one of my operating systems which were installed on two separate partitions of my hard drive. Cloning a hard drive means that I made an exact bit by bit copy of one hard drive onto another. In my case I cloned each partition on my internal hard drive onto an external hard drive. To do this I used the live CD made by Clonezilla.

VirtualBox image The virtual machine that I am using is a free piece of software called VirtualBox made by Oracle. I have had VirutalBox installed on my computer for almost 3 years but have never been brave enough to actually try to install Windows in the virtual machine.

After having both hard drive partitions backed up and cloned on the external hard drive I used Parted Magic to resize my Linux partition. The program Parted is a nondestructive hard drive partitioner. I was able to delete the 150 GB partition where Windows was installed and increase the size of my Linux partition to use the whole hard drive. I was very pleased to reboot my system and find that my Linux installation worked perfectly without having to make any adjustments.

My original plan was to create a virtual machine by installing the cloned a Windows partition. But I realized that there were many programs and add-ons that I have collected through the years. Therefore, I decided to install Windows from scratch into the virtual machine. I then installed the few programs that I needed.

While this probably sounds like it only took a couple of hours, it actually took me close to three days. Cloning the two partitions took several hours each. The Windows partition took over 10 hours, and the Linux partition took seven. In the end, I did not need to have cloned either partition since I installed Windows from scratch and my Linux installation continued to work after resizing the hard drive. However, having the partitions cloned gave me great security and confidence as I continued through the project. Another 6 hours were spent migrating data from the external hard drive into the Windows virtual machine. While there really wasn’t that much data to bring back into Windows, I was constantly fighting the system because Windows had to install more than 130 updates. If I wasn’t monitoring the computer it would randomly reboot to install updates which would break my data transfers. Fortunately only the virtual machine had to reboot, not the actual computer which was running Linux.

I won’t be doing any gaming with this Windows installation. A virtual machine runs on limited resources. The few programs that I use Windows for are neither real-time critical nor processor intensive.

It is nice to use Windows without having to reboot my computer. I would normally have to boot into Windows once a week to do certain tasks, but am now able to turn on Windows for a few minutes to do what I need to do whenever I want.

While VirtualBox seems to work well for my needs, it may not be for everyone. There was quite a bit of reading that I needed to do to understand how to get some of my hardware working inside Windows. If you are needing to use the virtualized operating system for processor intensive tasks, then a virtual machine may not be your best option. Since I have 3 GB of RAM on this computer, I dedicated 1/3rd of that to the Windows installation.

Have you played around with virtual machines? Run into any major reasons why you would tell people to avoid them? I was afraid some of my needed hardware would not work, but everything works as if I was running Windows natively on the computer.

Dodged a bullet in the shape of a hard drive

A few months ago I had trouble installing a newer version of Linux on my computer. This is my main machine and houses the vast majority of our data. After the install failed I tried a different distribution of Linux. While most everything worked fine, there was one issue that haunted me. The hard drive partition that we have our photos stored on would not mount (I could not read from it). In fact as soon as I tried to mount the partition the whole machine would lock up instantly. Two other partitions on that drive worked without any problems.

I was hoping that the newer version of Kubuntu would take care of the problem. After installing it I was still getting the same behavior I had experienced with Slackware; instant lockup as soon as I tried to touch the partition.

In preparation for a new external hard drive purchase I decided to dig into this problem.

With the drive completely unmounted (even the partitions that were working fine) I ran an fsck check on the partitions. Since the partition is an ext3 file system I ran the following command:

sudo fsck.ext3 /dev/sdb2

Western Digital External Hard Drive Sudo gives me root privileges. fsck.ext3 is the fs (file system) ck (check) specific for ext3 formatted partitions. The /dev/sdb2 means that I ran it on my second drive and second partition of that drive.

After putting in my root password I got a bunch of output that said:

Free blocks count wrong for group #XX ...

It asked it I wanted to fix it and I replied yes to the couple of hundred requests.

Apparently the drive was not cleanly unmounted. By running fsck I allowed it to clean up the corrupted table that said where all the data lived. While my drive is a traditional internal drive, this is a good lesson as to why you should always eject USB drives, or any type of media, before popping them out of your computer. That is true for whatever operating system you are running.

I am pleased to have recovered the 28 GB of photos that I had on there. I have most of them backed up in various locations, but do not have a full backup in one place. Since today is Thanksgiving I guess I should say I am thankful for having finally gotten to the bottom of this and that tomorrow is Black Friday and I am able to pick up an external HD that will back up all the computers on my network with room to spare.

Now, where is that coupon code for those online backup solutions?

Famous Friday: OpenOffice.org Training

I have been an OpenOffice.org fan since 2000. It has been better and worse as a product at different times in its history. There are forums in which I have participated and spewed as much knowledge as I can to other members. I have been somewhat of an OOo evangelist and have given presentations at different meetings (Linux enthusiast groups and corporate groups) as to why people should seriously consider OOo.

I started reading a blog a few months back that has helped me with some of the more detailed uses of OOo. Though I certainly don’t have as much heavy daily use for OOo as some people, I have enjoyed reading Solveig Haugland’s OpenOffice.org Training blog. She has some very detailed how-to articles at the site as well as some great articles on how to make the transition to OOo.

If you see an article that does not apply to you at the time, just skim over it and know that it is there. You might be surprised by how often you find yourself going back to the site to check out a how-to that you previously skimmed over. Solveig has a great way of simplifying a complex process.

There is a lot of good stuff in her archives. Be sure to search around for tutorials. I used to hit the forums when I needed help. Now, before I go to the forums, I check out Solveig’s site.