Playing games on a Mac?

Unlike a few years ago, there’s not much need to run Windows on a Mac. With tools like Remote Desktop and compatible IDEs for Microsoft SQL, there’s much more compatibility. The main reason comes down to playing games that don’t have a Mac equivalent. For example, Dorfromantik. What if you want to play Dorfromantik, Banished, Carcassonne, or something similar? Actually, it’s not that hard using either a Virtual Machine or Wine. Keep in mind, a virtual machine requires a copy of Windows. You also need a fair bit of ram to pull this off. I’ve got the older Mac Pro on Mojave, so I’ve got plenty of ram and processors, but no more OS updates. It’s not the end of the road for this machine, but it’s on the horizon. If I can do my main work and play some casual games that’s a win. I have a Windows machine for games, but if I want to play something for […]

Windows 7 running on a MacBook Pro in VirtualBox – The Ultimate Sin

I think I’ve committed several sins here. I installed VirtualBox so I could set up a Windows 7 machine. No big deal, I’ve done that dozens of times in the past, but now I’ve done it under the OSX using the Macbook Pro work just gave me. I believe I hear a torch bearing crowd gathering outside the castle walls! Actually, it runs very well, at least so far. I don’t really have anything installed yet, but Windows is quite responsive with just the 2GB of ram I gave it. I need to do browser tests and some of that will have to be done under Windows – curse you IE!! Things are working out pretty well so far. VirtualBox works exactly the same under OSX so getting a machine up and running only took a few minutes. Now, I’m not connecting it to AD or any other MS systems, it’s simply there to connect to the Internet and load […]

How to configure a Web Server within VirtualBox

The point of the project was this, create a web server using VirtualBox and host it on a Windows 7 64-bit platform. And why would I do something odd? Well, I need a copy of Windows 2003 Server Web Edition running on a new platform since the physical PC it was running on literally tore itself to pieces. The drives failed and the cost of buying EIDE drives is just a waste of money. So why not just upgrade? Well, I will in the future, but I was actually using that machine. I’m familiar with 2003 and had everything dialed in the way I like it. And why host it in Windows 7? That’s the host OS of my most powerful machine, a 6-core machine with 16GB of ram. No sense in rebuilding everything when Windows 2003 Server isn’t multicore aware and only accesses 4GB of ram. But anyway, the OS and the host are sort of irrelevant, it’s the […]

VirtualBox Cannot register the image because UUID already exists

I’ve ran into a snag with VirtualBox. I made some images on my work laptop and when I try to load them on my home desktop machine I run into the following error: Cannot register the image ‘C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxGuestAdditions.iso’ with UUID ‘{4a16c3ed-691e-4878-9576-d1113bc5a699}’ because a ‘C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxGuestAdditions.iso’ with UUID {…} already exists It turns out the Guest Additions ISO is loaded for one of the images, but I have no idea which one since UUIDs mean nothing to me. Basically, the Virtual Machine won’t load and there doesn’t seem to be a whole you can do about it from the UI. After doing some digging I believe I have a way to get around the problem quite easily. Go into the directory where the Virtual Machine file is located and open the .VBOX file. It’s an XML and is easily read by an editor such as Notepad++. Look for the line: <HardDisk uuid="{4a16c3ed-691e-4878-9576-d1113bc5a699}" location="Windows 2008.vdi" format="VDI" type="Normal"/> as in this example: […]

Converting A Physical Hard Drive To A Virtual Hard Disk

At first glance the project seemed easy – clone the physical hard drive inside a server and restore it into VirtualBox so as to use the virtual copy. Turns out, it doesn’t work the way I envisioned it in my head. All the latest software made promises of one-click cloning and on the fly conversion to VHD. But in the end, after three days of trying, I’m scrapping this project. I just can’t seem to get it to work. I tried using the latest software like O&O DiskImage 6, which listed VHD as one of the output formats. Well, it outputs to VHD alright, but that image doesn’t load. I cloned the drive without incident, but for the life of me I can’t that server to boot in a virtual environment. I created a VHD, I restored to a new VDI, I installed a new OS and tried the restore from there, I used a boot CD and restored from […]