[fpc-devel] TRegistry and Unicode

[Giuliano Colla]

Il 14/03/2019 18:32, Bart ha scritto:
> That is not really the issue.
> My machine is Win10 on i5 with 8GB memory.
> I run Mint in aVirtualBox VM (a bit sluggish, but do-able).
> I don't have a Windows installable medium with license that I can
> install into a VM.
> And I'm not gonna buy it, nor am I gonna use some pitate copy.

You don't need to buy a licence, or to use a pirated copy to run your 
Windows in a VM.

You may run your legal copy of Windows on a VM just by using the raw 
disk or raw partition feature of VirtualBox.

What I've done is the following.

I have repartitioned the original disk in order to free enough space for 
a Linux install.
By installing Linux on the free space, the first result is to have a 
dual boot box.
Then, in Linux I have created my VM machines, and among them a Windows 
VM which just uses the Windows partitions of the disk.
That way the physical disk is the same of the original install, and 
Windows doesn't complain about licensing issues.
You may find detailed instructions on how to do it in the VirtualBox 
Help, under Advanced topics->Advanced storage configuration. But 
basically that's done from Linux with just one command line, which in my 
case is:

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ~/VirtualBox\ VMs/Windows7/windows7.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda -partitions 1,2,3,5 -mbr win7.mbr

where the required MBR has been created from Linux with sort of:

dd if=/dev/sda of=win7.mbr count=1

if you want to get the main MBR, or

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=win7.mbr count=1

if you want to get the MBR from the Windows start partition.

If you select a "conservative" Linux distro (such as CentOs) you get a 
rock solid, bullet proof, main OS for any other task, you may do a lot 
of Windows testing by just using wine, and you may safely play with all 
of yours VM's, creating snapshots before doing dangerous things such as 
tampering with registry. But you keep the chance to run the "native" 
Windows in order to judge the real performance, and look.

Maybe, before doing all of that, a full backup of your disk with 
Clonezilla would be a wise precaution....

Giuliano

-- 
Do not do to others as you would have them do to you.They might have different tastes.