Software Review (VirtualBox)

OK I have to share with all the geeks out there some fantastic software I have stumbled across.

A year or so ago I was running Vmware to add a windows compatability layer to my Linux distribution. A virtual machine offers severe performance advantages over emulation so it was the way to go for me. I have been running Linux as my primary desktop since the early 1980's. I have never been a big fan of pirated Microsoft software and so I being the cheap bastard that I am looked for an alternative to Windows. My Amiga was a unix like OS and so I was already comfortable with the Command Line Interface or CLI, the move to Linux was just a natural one to me. Above: Original Amiga 1000

Recently I had been listening to a friend rave about VirtualBox, how fast it is and how well it supports hardware as a much improved virtual machine over vmware. VirtualBox is produced and released free by the Gods at Sun Microsystems and so I was willing to give it a chance.

Well I had this Acer piece of crap laptop that I spent 600 bucks on in Calgary and in less than a year the laptop had died on me. The so called support team at Acer refused to help me get the laptop fixed for any reasonable price. They said the best they could do is replace the laptop for around 500 bucks... W00T? I am stuck with this piece of crap that doesn't work? Stupid Acer, I will never recommend or buy another one, they are made with cheap plastic that cracks and fades within months anyhow... Ok enough of the anger... I installed VirtualBox on my linux ubuntu distro and created a drive of 2GB... Then I used the windows license I paid for when I bought that stupid ACER laptop to install WindowsXP Home Edition... not sure why I made such a small drive cause Windows is a pig... But I guess I was thinking that the option to dynamically resize the partition would apply if I needed space in the future... what it actually means is that the actual space on your physical drive is only the size of the data that is contained in the virtual drive and so you have a maximum dynamic state of up to the 2Gb... So I suggest you make a larger drive to begin with in VirtualBox...

Anyhow now for the software I recommend highly... I was looking for a way to clone this virtual drive and I stumbled across yet another awsome Linux ISO disk. It's called G4U - Harddisk Image Cloning for PC's the iso can be burned to a real CD to be booted in the drive or it can be loaded by VirtualBox as if it were a physical CD. Now this is awsome!

On to what it does...

G4U has the ability to copy a disk to disk partition just like Norton Ghost does, or if you don't have a second drive installed... you can use the FTP option to upload the hard drive image to an FTP location and then back down to several or a single system. This is a FANTASTIC feature!

And so I was able to clone my 2 gb virtual partition to the new 25 gb virtual partition which should leave room for all the basic programs and files...

This is FREE and quality software folks... If your a geek, and you need to clone hard drives, this is for you!