If you’ve come across this already then this might be obvious, but in order to mount a USB external drive on an Ubuntu VirtualBox guest running on a Mac OS X host, you need to unmount the drive in Mac’s Finder first. Then using either click the USB icon in the status bar in your Ubuntu guest and you’ll see the drive un-greyed out (when it’s mounted on the Mac it appears greyed out and you can’t select it) – click it and it will mount automatically. Or you can do the same thing from the VirtualBox menu, Devices/USB.
Expanding a Virtual Box Windows XP virtual disk
The .vdi file can be expanded using the same vboxmanage command as here. To use the expanded diskspace in XP you can either create a new partition from within XP (using the Computer Management tool from Control Panel/Admin Tools), or you can expand the current partition size to fill the available space.
To expand an existing partition, you’ll need to boot the virtual machine with a ISO disk image containing some disk utils, something like GParted. Attach the ISO disk image to your virtual machine and boot it up. Use the GParted tool to resize the partition, then shutdown, remove the mounted ISO and reboot Windows. It will now see the expanded partition size.
Fedora 18 & 19 – terrible performance on Virtual Box
I’m not sure what the deal is with Fedora 18 & 19 but the performance running under Virtual Box in Windows, regardless of how much memory you throw at the VM, really is unbearably slow. I had 18 installed for a while but haven’t used it for several months. I just fired it up again and it’s unusable. Downloaded 19 and started the install and it took a couple of hours. I might have something else going on on my laptop that slowing down the performance, but as it is it’s unusable.
I was looking for a RHEL derivative other than Oracle Linux since I wasn’t prepared wait to download the massive disk images which are several GB (really?!). I just realized though that CentOS is RHEL compatible. Very cool. Will download and see if it’s more usable under Virtual Box.
Unmounting Bootcamp to use as a drive for Virtual Box
Part of the instructions for setting up Virtual Box to boot from your Bootcamp drive on Mac OS X walk you through setting up a permanent approach to unmounting your Bootcamp drive. I didn’t follow those instructions, instead created a script that I can use to run manually to unmount and open the permissions when needed, i.e. when I want to boot from VirtualBox:
diskutil umount /Volumes/BOOTCAMP sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s4
The instructions on some sites also assume that your Bootcamp drive is partition disk0s3, but on my machine it’s disk0s4. If you run ‘diskutil list’ you can get a list of your partitions to work out which is your Bootcamp partition.