June 30, 2009

Using physical partition on a USB disk with VirtualBox on Mac OS X

I wanted to use an external USB disk with a physical partition for a virtual machine in VirtualBox on my MacBook Air, and this isn’t obvious from the gui. So this is what I found out I had to do.

First, make sure that there is no partition on the disk. Then run this command:

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename \
  ~/Library/VirtualBox/usbdisk.vmk -rawdisk /dev/disk1 -register

You can now create a virtual machine and use usbdisk.vmk to install a new OS on.

Update: Later, OS X might auto mount the volume created during install. You must unmount this before you can start the virtual machine again.

•
April 14, 2008
Finally got my connection running at nearly full speed. Mmmmm — speeeed.

Finally got my connection running at nearly full speed. Mmmmm — speeeed.

•
March 19, 2008
Før tørklædeforbudet
•
“ Hi, I’m Web Developer Barbie. Pull my string and I say, “Standards are tough! Let’s go shopping!
Mark Pilgrim on Joel Spolsky •
January 27, 2008
For once I seem to be ahead on my feed reading

For once I seem to be ahead on my feed reading

•
January 23, 2008
My new knife: 37 layer damascus steel — yummi

My new knife: 37 layer damascus steel — yummi

•
“ The tech press, it seems, has a bad record on judging products on criteria you can’t fit on a feature matrix.
Charles Miller on the MacBook Air •
November 27, 2007
Cannot uninstall because a file could not be installed (and, the uninstall did not continue but was aborted)

Cannot uninstall because a file could not be installed (and, the uninstall did not continue but was aborted)

•
November 14, 2007
“ They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later.
Dirk Gently, stating that Newton merely discovered gravity •
November 13, 2007

Colibri tips

I have been using Colibri for a while and - inspired by Humanized Enso - really wanted to use the Caps Lock key to launch it. But unfortunately the configuration dialog requires you to press a combination of two keys.

Then today I found out that you can modify the configuration directly in a couple of SQLite databases(*). So by setting the key combination to eg. Ctrl+Caps Lock and then disable the Ctrl key in the database, I now only need to press the Caps Lock (and at the same time I prevent the default behavior of the key - YAY!)

You can also add aditional paths that should be indexed by inserting in Filesystem.sqlite

(*) The files are located in C:\Documents and Settings\{user}\Application Data\Colibri

Update: You’ll need some kind of SQLite browser. I’ve used SQLiteadmin. Also, Jesper has disabled his Caps Lock key and suggests Ctrl+Scroll Lock as an alternative combination.

•