- Inlove with God

Laboratory No.1 – Familiarization of Virtual Box (Windows) • Procedure

click on the “New” button in the top left hand corner of the Virtual Box Manager window.

Enter the name of the Virtual Machine. The type if operating system is Microsoft Windows and the version is WindowsXP.

Select the amount of RAM that you want to allocate to the virtual machine.

Create " Virtual Hard Disk " ( VHD) and click done.

Make sure that the new virtual machine that you just created is selected in the Virtual Box Manager window, then click on the “Start” button at the top of the window.

When the VM starts up you’ll be greeted by the “First Run Wizard”, which will guide you through getting ready to install Windows XP. Click “Continue”.

Select start up disk as winxpko.iso (571.94 MB).

In the list all you’ll see is an “Unpartitioned space” the size of the VHD you created in Step 3. You want to set up XP here, so press “ENTER”. Choose “Format the partition using the NTFS file system (Quick)”

The “Windows XP Setup Wizard” will pop up. Click “Next” to get started. First you’ll be asked to set your regional and language options, which basically involves clicking on “Customize…” to choose your country and then “Details” if you need to change your keyboard layout. Once that’s sorted, click “Next” again.

Enter computer name, and an Administrator password, select date and time and time zone then click next

Just click next. And then you will see the "welcome" screen and the familiar windowsXP desktop.

• Observation

Virtual Box will try to figure out what OS you plan to run on the VM based on what you name it. If the name of the VM has “XP” in it somewhere it assumes that you’ll be installing Windows XP and will adjust itself accordingly. If you have a cryptic name for it, though, don’t worry. You can manually choose the OS type from the drop- down boxes below.

You’ll be asked to select the amount of RAM that you want to allocate to the virtual machine. The more you give the VM the smoother it’ll run, but be warned; memory allocated to the VM is memory that the host OS (that is, the computer you’ve installed Virtual Box on) won’t be able to use.

Next you’ll be asked if you want to create a “dynamically expanding” disk (which I’ll call a dynamic disk from now on) or a “fixed size” disk. Each has its own benefits. The great thing about a dynamic disk is that it’s only as large as the data that it has on it; you can assign it plenty of space without having to worry about whether you’ll use it or whether you’ll run out of space. They’re also a lot faster to create than a fixed disk of any significant size. However, you’ll need to keep an eye on it, because its flexibility can also be its downfall. Say you create a dynamic disk and assign it 50 GB, then put about 20GB of data on it. The dynamic disk file will show up as taking only 20GB of space on the hard drive according to your host OS. Great. You fill up the rest of the free space on your physical hard drive.

Thing is, if you start up the VM and try to add more data to the dynamic disk, you’ll run into trouble – the virtual disk says that it’s still got 30GB free, but there’s nowhere to actually put that 30GB of data. The VM freaks out, thinking that the hard drive is failing, but that’s not true. It just needs some more breathing room on the physical drive to store the data it’s been told it’s able to save.

The size you should make the VHD depends on how much stuff you plan to put in it, but if you’re using a dynamic disk it doesn’t really matter if you allocate it lots of space. If you’re just using it to run a few programs, the suggested size of 10GB should be plenty!

It’ll then ask you what you want to use for installation media; that is, whether you want to install it using a CD and the host’s optical drive, or whether you want to install it from a disk image on your hard drive (usually in the form of a .iso file). You can choose the former from the drop down menu or the latter by browsing for the .iso file (using a standard “open file” dialog)

• Conclusion