Tag Archive: win7


Proxmox VE 1.8 and KVM: Adding sound to your virtual machines!

Filed Under: How To, Linux, OS, Proxmox VE, virtualization, Windows by Jason L Froebe — Leave a comment
April 7, 2011

This assumes that your host machine has a sound card! :)

Add the args line in your /etc/qemu-server/<vm id>.conf file should give you sound:

args: -soundhw

On my Proxmox VE 1.8, I have several virtual audio devices available.   I’ve had the best luck with ac97 with Windows XP/Vista and Win7.

red:/etc/qemu-server# kvm -soundhw ‘?’
Valid sound card names (comma separated):
pcspk       PC speaker
sb16        Creative Sound Blaster 16
ac97        Intel 82801AA AC97 Audio
es1370      ENSONIQ AudioPCI ES1370
hda         Intel HD Audio

-soundhw all will enable all of the above

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How to disable the “uninstall password” to uninstall Symantec Antivirus

Filed Under: How To, Oracle, OS, Windows by Jason L Froebe — 5 Comments
March 10, 2010

I was trying to install Oracle 11g client on to a WinXP box but Symantec Antivirus wouldn’t let me because it thought it was infected with over 800 viruses.  Same file was marked clean on another box.  So, I picked several of the viruses it said was infected with and looked for any evidence of them on the WinXP box.  No dice.  This led me to believe that Symantec Antivirus itself was somehow mucked up.

When I tried to uninstall Symantec Antivirus, it asked for a password.  When I put in the correct password, it refused it.  So how to uninstall it with a messed up password?  Easy..

Open up regedit (as an administrator) and change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\INTEL\LANDesk\VirusProtect6\CurrentVersion\AdministratorOnly\Security\UseVPUninstallPassword to “0″ (zero).

I was able to uninstall and reinstall Symantec Antivirus.

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How to convert a laptop running Microsoft Windows 7 to a VirtualBox virtual machine

Filed Under: How To, Linux, OS, virtualization, Windows by Jason L Froebe — 11 Comments
December 21, 2009

I was very much surprised just how easy it is to convert a Microsoft Windows 7 laptop into a virtual machine running within Sun’s VirtualBox.  This is what I did:

  • Pull the hard drive from the laptop.  On my Dell Latitude, it was simply unscrewing the two screws on the bottom of the laptop marked with the hard drive simble
  • Attach the drive to a SATA to USB connector and plug it in to your Linux box
  • If you don’t have VirtualBox installed, do so now using apt-get, rpm, or whatever you use to install software
  • Follow How to migrate existing Windows installations to VirtualBox but make sure you specify the entire drive (i.e. /dev/sdh) and not individual partitions else you will miss the hidden partitions that Vista and Windows 7 create

You should have a working Windows 7 Virtual Machine.  You’ll notice that you probably have a huge vdi file.  Let’s shrink that down:

  • Within Windows
    • download and install sdelete from Microsoft
    • download and install PowerDefragmenter
    • Run PowerDefragmenter on your c: drive (as administrator)
    • Run “sdelete -c c:” from a cmd window (as administrator)
    • shutdown windows
  • On the host
    • run “VBoxManage modifyvdi my_disk.vdi compact” replacing “my_disk.vdi” with the name of your vdi file you created earlier
    • Note that if you get a “Shrink hard disk operation is not implemented” error, then you’ve hit bug #2833 and you will want to download the latest VirtualBox to fix it.
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