Here's – nnish! Nishanth Anil

Guest Additions on Virtual Box can be installed by changing compatibility to Windows 7 but that doesn’t mean it can be made to work. Yeah that’s where I too got stuck and my hunt for a fix to it also stopped when I read this forum.

I found few others who have tried complicated file sharing techniques, for e.g. they  created a secondary virtual hard drive and put files into it. However being working on Windows for more than a decade, I do believe there should be a simple way to achieve it. After all they are two different windows machines on the network.

Well what would you do to access a share drive on another system? Start->Run-> and type “\\machine-name\share” and hit enter?  That wouldn’t work because your host machine name will not be recognized by your virtual machine since they are on a different network group.

Now here is the solution: Go ahead and figure out the IP address of your host machine(ipconfig) and try accessing the share by its IP address instead of the machine name. That works!

 

Things are simple, we complicate it most of the time.

 

/* Nish */

2009 was the year I wrote a post on Installing Windows 7 on VMware, and 2 years later with the same excitement here I am saying Hello to Windows 8. This time I am not elaborating on the installation but yes will share some interesting posts already on it.

Few approaches:

Installing Windows 8 Developer Preview in a virtual machine. – I did this, it worked for me!

Step by step instructions to install Windows 8 successfully on VMWare Workstation 8

“Installing Windows 8 Developer Preview as bootable VHD” – It yields much better performance, this will be my next shot!

Before I decided to install it on the Virtual Box, I gave an attempt on the Windows Virtual PC which came pre-installed with my OS (if Windows XP Mode is enabled). But then the Win 8 version I wanted to install was a 64 bit developer preview and unfortunately Virtual PC does not support 64bit guest OS. You will get this error “This 64-bit application couldn’t load because your PC doesn’t have a 64-bit processor”.

Installation on a VirtualBox was a different experience for me – BSODs and Graphical driver crash. No you may not face this because unlike me; you would never attempt to run a Virtual PC in parallel with a Virtual Box .

One important thing to do before you install is to check, if your processor supports Virtualization and enable it in your BIOS. If not you will get this error “Failed to start virtual machine (name of machine) VT-x is not available” when you start the VM.

If you are using an Intel Processor, check its specification at ark.intel.com, Intel Virtualization technology(VT-X) should be supported.

By default these features are disabled, so enable these from your BIOS settings.

Go ahead and complete your installation:

I must say this before I conclude this post – “Win 8 without a touch monitor on a VM is just a Win 7 with painful experience!” If you are a developer and you want your machine to respond as per your original hardware then do a clean install or use a VHD!.

Some interesting links:

Windows Developer Preview Guide

Metro Style App Examples

WinRT Capabilities

Note: Please read the disclaimer on my page before you get started.

/*Nish*/