cant select a lower burn speed other than 10x speed?

[A Future Pilot]

Code: Select all

vdfuse -w -f ~/Downloads/winxp.vdi ~/virtual

That should work if it's in the Downloads folder. If not tell me the exact error message. (You can select the words in terminal, and it should automatically copy, so you can paste it here.)

Out of curiosity...why are you wanting to mount it?

[sagirfahmid3]

Tsk tsk tsk...you are WAAY to dramatic for your age OP, no offense. Please keep the posts concise and to the point (whining gets people nowhere).

1. If the CD only burns at 10x and corrupts the image and you can't do anything about it, then that's that...no point crying over it. Time for another approach.

2.

Well...I would suggest finding a friend who has a drive...or maybe going to a library or some other place with computers you can use.

What he said^^

3. If you're too lazy for Linux, if you don't want to work at it, and if you don't face your commandline fears, you can't get anywhere. Besides, cmd gets easier soon enough.

4. ALTERNATIVE: If you still have a copy of Linux Mint disk somewhere, you can boot into it, open up GParted, then make a small partition on the harddrive for a "frugal" install for Puppy Linux (using Unetbootin). There's plenty of information online for frugal installs; look it up.

[A Future Pilot]

Hey!!! That just game me an idea...if you still have the Linux Mint LiveCD, you can use it to install any OS you want...tell me if you have it, and I can walk you through it

(Honestly though...if you don't like using the command line and stuff (which reads to me that you want something easy and straightforward) puppy probably isn't for you. Though by all means try it if you want to! ...I'd still suggest peppermint however)

[realflow100]

i was wanting to mount the file so i could copy all the files onto one of my external hard drives and attempt to boot from the external hard drive (knowing that all the files would be copyed for the operating system itself to boot without using grub or something it should boot on any computer right? and continue the installation?
i dont really mind linux its just its terrribly slow on my old laptop so i wanted something a little lighter but i couldn't find any .vdi's with puppy linux installed on them so i found one of windows xp instead

and that IS the exact error message

error: cannot access imagefile
i tried using the sudo command to do mount it as root but it still gives me the exact same error

sorry i dont have the CD to isntall linux mint anymore that was gone ages ago when my friend borrowed it and he lost it

[A Future Pilot]

If you don't have any USB ports how are you going to copy the files to an external HDD?

What exactly are the specs of your laptop?

[realflow100]

i dont know what my laptop has on it... but i can just copy the files directly off my laptop (copying them from the mounted .vdi directly to the external hard drive my laptop has a external hard drive port on it (its really old but it still works) its an hp laptop but i dont know what the model of it is or anything i dont know anything about computers

[sagirfahmid3]

i dont really mind linux its just its terrribly slow on my old laptop so i wanted something a little lighter but i couldn't find any .vdi's with puppy linux installed on them so i found one of windows xp instead

I doubt that XP .vdi will work on your laptop. Windows isn't like Linux where if you swap out the motherboard and all, everything will be fine...No...
Microsoft, like the doochbags they are, don't allow it (meaning, that .vdi, if restored to your harddrive, wont work and will probably only work for the person's computer that it was made on).

[A Future Pilot]

OK, if you have that external drive port...can you boot from it? Can you mount it in Mint? If both of those are true then we can get somewhere

And yeah...XP that was booting in a virtual machine won't work booting from a laptop :/

[realflow100]

doesn't hurt to try does it? i really want to get this to work

[A Future Pilot]

In your BIOS (hitting F2 or Delete on bootup) can you tell it to boot from the external drive? (For either another version of Linux OR XP you'll have to be able to boot from the external drive.)

[realflow100]

Yes I can but I need to copy all the files to the external hard drive in order to boot it up or else i will get (failed loading operating system) or something close to that

[AlbertP]

You won't get any functional operating system unless you restore the bootloader in the partition's boot sector with a Windows XP CD.

[realflow100]

bootmgr (the boot manager for windows) is already in the .vdi and when i copy all the files to the external hard drive and set it to boot it will boot up using the bootmgr from the external hard drive that i had copied from the .vdi file (its a hidden protected operating system file but i can still copy it so i was gonna copy it to my external drive along with ALL the other files neccessary to boot windows i copy all the files in the .vdi including all the hidden operating system protected files to my external hard drive and boot from my external hard drive (i may be able to boot into safe mode and get things working fairly decent) i would be happy if i could just try... please? does anyone know how to fix the cannot access imagefile error?

[A Future Pilot]

Are you wanting to use XP as your primary OS? From the external drive? I seriously doubt that'll work, but here's how you can do it:

Boot the .vdi inside virtualbox. Then use Clonezilla: http://clonezilla.org/ to create an image of the disk. Then use clonezilla again, to restore the image to the external drive.

[realflow100]

i can't boot the .vdi my computer doesnt have enough RAM (512MB) my computer would explode if i tried to do that.. i can barely open the volume control... let alone a web browser starting a virtual machine.... thats out of the question my computer would die

[A Future Pilot]

Well in that case I'm out of ideas...I honestly have never really done this before.

If you want to install Puppy Linux, I can walk you through that using your external drive.

EDIT: actually I found a way that might work...although once again I seriously doubt that XP will work on physical hardware after being installed to virtual hardware.

Code: Select all

VBoxManage internalcommands converttoraw ~/Downloads/winxp.vdi winxp.img

That should convert it to an image file. Then you should be able to use

Code: Select all

dd if=winxp.img of=/dev/sdXY

where XY is the letter and number of your drive. (Probably sdb1)

[AlbertP]

bootmgr (the boot manager for windows) is already in the .vdi and when i copy all the files to the external hard drive and set it to boot it will boot up using the bootmgr from the external hard drive that i had copied from the .vdi file (its a hidden protected operating system file but i can still copy it so i was gonna copy it to my external drive along with ALL the other files neccessary to boot windows i copy all the files in the .vdi including all the hidden operating system protected files to my external hard drive and boot from my external hard drive (i may be able to boot into safe mode and get things working fairly decent) i would be happy if i could just try... please? does anyone know how to fix the cannot access imagefile error?

The partition boot sector is not a hidden file. It will not be copied if you copy files, but you can use CloneZilla to clone the NTFS partition that's inside the VDI, if you get the VDI mounted.

[realflow100]

the external hard drive is already formatted as ntfs and if i copy all the files from the .vdi to my external hard drive. i could go to the bios and set my external hard drive to boot and it would boot up windows (i might have to use safe mode because some drivers may need to be disabled or updated and such to support my real computer) but it SHOULD work shouldn't it?

[realflow100]

Well in that case I'm out of ideas...I honestly have never really done this before.

If you want to install Puppy Linux, I can walk you through that using your external drive.

EDIT: actually I found a way that might work...although once again I seriously doubt that XP will work on physical hardware after being installed to virtual hardware.

Code: Select all

VBoxManage internalcommands converttoraw ~/Downloads/winxp.vdi winxp.img

That should convert it to an image file. Then you should be able to use

Code: Select all

dd if=winxp.img of=/dev/sdXY

where XY is the letter and number of your drive. (Probably sdb1)

Umm I get an error when i try to run the command

VBoxManage: error: Only converting harddisk images is supported

help?

[oobetimer]

Just a comment: Virtualbox-image will not work like a normal installation with windows, because Virtualbox gives a virtual environment which is different than real one. The result will be BSOD ..