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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Fusion’ Category

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Stop 0x0000007B after converting an existing XP machine to a Virtual Machine (ESXi, Hyper-V, or other)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/22

In 2015, I posted P2V of an existing XP machine to Hyper-V to have an emergency fallback when retiring old XP physical machines and did a short edit on 20210727 promising about a future article on trying to fix the [Wayback] stop 0x0000007B blue screen.

This stop can that can happen during boot when the converted Windows XP requires different disk drivers than the physical Windows XP. Windows Vista and up are smarter to figure out the required changes, but Windows XP wasn’t.

The above screenshot is actually from the same physical Windows XP machine after doing the conversion, I wanted to try and run the virtual machine on physical hardware close to the original before moving it to the actual VMware host (yup, the Windows XP machine had been used as a VMware host before, so it had both VMware Workstation 6.5 and VMware Converter 4.01 installed).

The reason I wanted to move my last Windows XP machine to a virtual machine was that it was the only computer that could still print to my old, but nice, Olympus P-400 color dye sublimation printer. I mentioned this in 2015 when Installing the PIXMA mini260 – Canon Europe drivers under Windows 8.1 x64 – trying to say goodbye to Windows XP

I need to find a way to get my [Wayback/Archive.is] Olympus Camedia P-400 Digital Color Photo Printer. That is a lot harder: the latest Windows [Wayback] P-400 Printer > Software Downloads are for Windows XP.

At the end, of the blog post are a few links on the stop 0x0000007B and the Universal Boot CD for Windows workaround.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Fusion, Hyper-V, Power User, View, Virtualization, VMware, VMware Converter, VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation, Windows, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

Some links that should me help shrinking the virtual disk files of Windows VMs

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/04/03

With virtual disks, at least these three levels are involved:

  • partition or volume (often called drive) size
  • virtual disk size
  • virtual disk backing store size

When talking about shrinking disks, they usually explain about below steps, assuming there is a 1:1:1 mapping of the above and backing store of the disk is dynamically growing:

  1. defragment the files on a partition/volume
  2. zero-fill the non-used space
  3. shrink the virtual disk assuming it is a dynamically growing one

For various reasons, virtualisation environments can have pre-allocated virtual disks ensuring the space on the backing store is firmly reserved.

One such occasion can be in VMware (often required for instance with vSphere/ESXi/ESX based infrastructure, but can also be used in Workstation/Fusion/Player) or Virtual Box in fixed disk mode (default there is dynamic).

Here are some links that should me help shrink in those situations:

More on conversion:

–jeroen

PS: a useful tip by Joe C. Hecht on shrinking:

Oh… On shrinking VM Disks, I make a new growable disk, then use a utility to “smart copy” the partions to the new disk (then replace the disk files in the VM). The “smart copy” just copies the file system – IE what is used (I use an old copy of Paragon Hard Drive Manager). It works out a lot better than writing “zeros”. I then make a compressed image of the whole VM using  rar5 compression with a 1GB dictionary size. I then have batch files that can unrar the VM’s on a moments notice (from a collection of over 300).

Posted in Fusion, Power User, VirtualBox, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation | Leave a Comment »

Always use SCSI for your VM guest disks – Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/01/20

Rephrased from [WayBack] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers – Google+:

If you install a virtual machine, ensure the disk controller and disks are SCSI based.

This has many advantages, including:

  • speed (usually the SCSI drivers can be paravirtualised)
  • hot addition of new disks

It holds for virtually any virtualization platform including all non-ancient (less than ~10 year old) versions of:

  • VMware (Workstation, Viewer, but I expect this also to work on vSphere, ESXI, Fusion)
  • Hyper-V
  • KVM (and therefore Proxmox)
  • VirtualBox

Based on my notes in the above link and the links below:

Note this isn’t just for Linux guests/hosts: Most guests (including Windows) can do a SCSI bus re-scan and detect new SCSI devices.

The trick here is that the guest must already have a virtual SCSI controller (adding that will require a reboot of the guest).

Then adding a new SCSI disk on that controller from any host (Windows, Mac, ESXi, vSphere) should work fine.

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi4, ESXi5, ESXi5.1, ESXi5.5, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, Fusion, Hyper-V, KVM Kernel-based Virtual Machine, Power User, Proxmox, View, VirtualBox, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation | Leave a Comment »

When Ctrl-Click in a Windows VMware Fusion VM does right-click, when you thought you turned that off

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/05/10

A while ago, I was surprised that in a Windows VM running under VMware Fusion, the Ctrl-Click performed a right click, despite me having changed the configuration:

I was wrong, as I had forgotten I assigned the “Windows 8 Profile” tot hat VM (as it was running Windows 8.1), which had the Secondary Button still mapped to the Control+Primary Button:

Related:

–jeroen

Posted in Fusion, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, Windows | Leave a Comment »

vmware Fusion/Workstation/ – How can you boot from CD? – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/05/10

Basically the boot delay during startup is so short that usually you cannot even choose the boot device.

Solution: edit the .vmx configuration file for the Virtual Machine, then change this value:

bios.bootDelay = "15000"

Source:

–jeroen

Posted in Fusion, Power User, Virtualization, VMware | Leave a Comment »

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