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Installing Portable Virtualbox from a machine with Virtualbox already installed

favbox

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Saturday, November 12th 2011, 12:41am

Installing Portable Virtualbox from a machine with Virtualbox already installed

I tried installing Portable Virtualbox as the next step in evolution from using Virtualbox, a great product in itself.
As such, I had already one instance of Virtualbox installed on my machine, and tried installing Portable Virtualbox on a USB drive attached to the same machine.

The result was, Portable Virtualbox got confused and, when launched it from the USB stick for the first time, it activated the Virtualbox copy on my machine rather than downloading/installing/configuring a fresh copy as expected.

In order for it to work on my USB, I had to uninstall it from my machine first. By doing so, it worked.

I am surprised I had to go through this loop. I would have imagined that many people don't start from scratch with Portable Virtualbox, and have already some virtual appliances that simply want to transfer from a machine to a USB, without actually having to uninstall Virtualbox from their machine.

Having said that, the product works nicely, although for what I'm doing is very very slow (even if I am using a high-speed USB 2.0 key).

Has anyone else experienced this?

zeroFX

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Sunday, November 13th 2011, 12:58pm

If by "experienced this" you mean that the portable launcher is starting the installed copy, if one is found, that is almost new, but WAD.
I don't know why there was no switch/dialogue added, to let the user choose the behaviour. But it can easily be worked around, if you get the sources from sourceforge, comment out or delete the location, where the "hybridmode" function is called (first appearence in code), then compile it with AutoIT and your done. You could then, obviously, delete/comment out the lines, where the hybidmode-function is defined (at the end of the code).

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Monday, November 14th 2011, 9:00pm

Thanks zeroFX. By "Has anyone else experienced this?" I was actually referring to both the fact that Pvbox gets confused as well as the slowness of the USB key, but I realise I should have been more specific on that.

I also realise there probably isn't anything to do about the USB slowness. I suspect that - even with faster USB keys - they are still slower than a regular hard-disk,

Thanks also for the suggestion about modifying and recompiling the code - I'll leave that to somebody else though.

Helmi

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Tuesday, November 15th 2011, 7:57am

USB 2.0 is limited to roughly 30-35 MB/s transfer speed.
While access times are considerably higher than with HDDs, transfer speed of ordinary (sub 50 € pieces) USB keys is mostly around a mere 10-15 MB/s with modern HDDs easily reaching 100 MB/s.
IDK if this is related to your problem but it will show an impact of you load the image from the key rather than just the portable programme (which should actually be faster if it contains lots of small files due to mentioned higher access times).

HTH!
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Stand Alone Driverpack (SAD2) für alle Betriebssysteme (XP, 2k3, 2k8, Vista, Win7)
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Thursday, November 17th 2011, 11:51pm

Thanks Helmi - I wasn't aware of the max transfer speed of USB 2 although it matches the transfer speed of my USB key which is a recent 64GB model.

One of the problems - I suspect - is when I use the OS in the key to do "special" tasks such as write to a mySQL database (e.g. via Drupal). I suspect that USB access type cannot cope with the way the tables are being written and it slows down until it crashes. This is one extreme aspect of what I experienced. There is also the general slowness. As you say, it is generally slower than a HDD.

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