Virtual Box

[MikeyAtl]

I am currently using a Compaq CQ60-615 DX laptop that normally runs Windows 7. I have made the backup disks to reinstall Win 7 if necessary. The problem is that Win 7 doesn't like to play well with the other kids (PCLOS 2009) when it comes to dual booting. I have installed GRUB & listed Win 7 as a boot option, However, I cannot get Win 7 to boot anymore - ie it just dies.

Is there any way to make it play well with PCLOS again so that both OSs will boot ?? I am considering Virtual Box and have downloaded and installed it via Synaptic but the configuaration to set it up seems difficult. Plus, when I did try to set it up, it only seems to "see" the  PCLOS system folders.

Am I trying to kick a dead horse using VB ?? All I need is access to Win 7 infrequently but it would be nice to be able to get in.

Thanks in advance for any help here !

[johnmart]

Hi MikeyAtl, welcome to the forum!
I seem to recall reading others dual-boot win7 experiences. Did you try a forum search? I gotta scoot right now, so give the forum a search & see what you come up with. 

Setting up virtualbox looks tricky but it really isn't. Gotta run, someone may check in with some input. I'll be back in a couple hours. In the meantime, have a look in the sticky threads in the Virtual Machine section.

See you later,
John

[j-retired]

Hi there - I think your experience of dual booting with win7 may be machine related - I tried it on one of mine and there was absolutely no problem at all.  However, when I have experienced dual boot problems it's usually been due to the drive letters being referenced wrongly. My memory doesn't carry enough detail, but it was a matter of working out which letters referred to which contents and editing the grub file.  I think sometimes there's a problem due to some systems counting from "0", others from "1". 
I'm sure someone else will fill in the missing blanks if this is your problem!

As for VB - don't panic - just try it - it's great, despite one or two foibles, one being the need to remember to add yourself to the VBox user group.  One suggestion though: when you set up a 'new' virtual HD for VBox, make it big enough to do something useful. I set one up for 10 gigs, and wondered why I ranout of space with win7 after I installed a few apps!  There are plenty of people who can help.
Do you need USB? If not, then install from the repos. If you do, then you need to get the rpm file from the Sun website - there is a VBox for PCLOS listed there. HOWEVER...... if you break your system lots of people will shout "Told you so!"  It's never broken my systems yet though.
Good luck!

j

[johnmart]

Hi again,
I found that sometimes one of the dual-boot installs messes up the mbr & needs repair.
Since PCLOS boots, possibly the win7 mbr info is at fault.
You could run fixmbr in winxp, but I bet win7 s different. Get some win7 mbr repair info via google & see where that leads you. Don't forget that forum search.  

You might get better response to your requests if you post a separate request for your vbox query in the virtual machine section.

See you.
John
edit: I run win7 in a vbox for a couple needs. Single boot PCLOS.

[14four]

If you only want to use W7 infrequently - as I do - I would suggest installing PCLOS and then using VirtualBox to install W7 as a guest OS.

Its not as daunting as it might first appear to be. Install from Synaptic if you don't anticipate wanting USB support in your guest OS, otherwise you'll need to download the RPM from Sun's site and install that (ask here if you're unsure how to do that).

Once you have VBox installed create a new VM using the wizard - just click on the New icon and follow the prompts. For W7 you'll need your VM to be a minimum of 20GB to be usable and allocate as much memory as you can - anything less than 1GB isn't really going to cut it, although I have had W7 running sluggishly with 512MB. You can always tweak the settings once you have your guest OS installed - the only thing you can't change easily (if at all[?]) is the VM size.

To share between the guest and the host you'll need to install Guest Additions; this will also add some other enhancements. To install Guest Additions: with the guest OS running go to the Devices menu at the top of the window and select Install Guest Additions... This will mount the Guest Additions .iso. You then need to run VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe on the virtually mounted CD. Once installed, restart the guest OS, right click on the folder icon at the bottom right of the window to open the Shared Folders dialogue box, click the folder with the plus sign on the right hand side and use the Add Share dialogue box to select the folder you want to share. In W7's Computer window click on Map network drive, choose a drive letter, click browse, click the VBOXSVR icon, select your shared folder, click OK and Finish and you're done!

Only thing I haven't been able to figure out yet is how to share in the other direction, i.e. set up a shared folder in W7 Guest that can be mounted in PCLOS Host.

[menotu]

I always found its best to install PCLOS after the Win 7 install and in my experience it never failed me.

Are you installing PCLos on a separate partition?

[bligh]

I have that same laptop.  I bought a new hdd, 250gb but 5400 not 7200, then copied win7 with clonezilla, I use the copy and just set the original aside.  I put another hdd in and installed Pclinux 2009.2, I used the frozen repo.  win7 has been no end of new issues.  I would like to try a virtual box to avoid burning a pile of coasters of versions I won't use.
I have Puppy save files on both drives in use.
Cheers

[OnlyHuman]

Hi MikeyAtl, I have a triple boot system, xp, vista, and PCLinuxOS, with 2 harddrives, serial ata hdd is the main drive with the original bootloader, I have found when installing PCLinuxOS when writing to the Grub bootloader it always by default writes to my second hdd, (which is n older parallel ata) so I always deselect it (hda) and change it to my sda.
Sometimes I have had to reinstall Windows and afterwards have found map references in the windows boot option which doesn't work, so I put in the livecd and boot it up and go to the boot info and delete where it mentions map references.
Don't know if that is of any help, but thought I would mention it in case.  

[Matt_Maguire]

Hi MikeyAtl,

When Grub did the setup did it show you 2 windows boot options? IE: hda 0,0 and hda 0,1.

Many windows PCs' have a small utilities or restore partition on the boot drive that will run utilities or just won't boot anything (no image). I have always found it at hda/sda 0,0.

If you inspect the boot drive with something like Gparted or use the tools in PCC, the larger partition will have the windows image you want to boot.

If you find that you configured Grub incorrectly, you can use RepairMBR (edit GRUB), or just re-install and select the correct windows partition when you configure Grub.

[humdinger70]

If you just upgraded to the latest version of VirtualBox, there's a regression problem..     

From the VBox people:
There is a known regression of VBox 3.1.6: The guest mouse cursor coordinates are -1,-1 off. So if you make the guest control panel auto hide, you will not be able to make it re-appear because the mouse cursor cannot be moved to the very lower bottom pixel of the guest.

Won't get fixed until next VBox maintenance release. To access panel, recommended to press either : 1) Windows key, 2) Ctrl+Escape.

[MikeyAtl]

Well my thanks to everyone who tried to help me but in this case it was operator error.

Apparently, when I set this OS up, I pointed to the wrong hard drive ie it pointed to the
boot sector instead of where Win 7 was actually mounted which is /mnt/sda1/Win 7.

I happened to find this out when I was selecting new mount points for all the HDDs on
my laptop.

Now, every OS on this laptop boots perfectly right from GRUB !

So, I apologize for all the extra work that I caused everyone.

Thanks again !

[j-retired]

We've all done it some time!!!!
Mark it solved now please.

j