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Posts Tagged xp
Virtual Box on Mac OS X
Posted by technohermit in Apple, Uncategorized, Virtualization, Windows on 2010/03/09
Oracle’s (formerly Sun’s) VirtualBox software is a virtualization software that allows you to run many operating systems on top of your OS X installation in real time. I’ve been running Apple’s Boot Camp with Windows 7 Ultimate, and decided it would still be beneficial to have an install of XP service pack 3 hanging around. I really didn’t feel like hacking Boot Camp was the best solution for having another OS on my system, so I started looking into alternatives. Surprisingly more than a few exist, although I decided on VirtualBox because, well, it’s free!
To start your installation, first download the software from the above link. Installation is as easy as a double-click, and a few prompt screens. Once complete, double-click the handy shortcut to your Applications folder, find the newly installed VirtualBox, and double-click that to start it running.
Help screens are well thought out, and tell you exactly where everything is to get started. They’ve also thrown in some nice pop-ups once you are up and running, to explain some shortcuts. More on that below. The first screen you see is the Details window, which is where you will find your various operating systems after you’ve installed them. It looks like this:
Next comes installation of your OS of choice, in this case I installed Windows XP SP2 (which I then updated to SP3 to be sure everything works properly.) There are some settings that need to be adjusted when you install, such as RAM and Hard Disk size. Simply click the “New” button in the upper left-hand corner to get started. VirtualBox walks you through the creation of the virtual machine and gives you allocation suggestions, which I modified to my liking. See screen shots below:
One thing I had to change were the video settings. XP would blue screen at the text phase of the installation on my MacBook Pro (mid-2008). I had the 2D Video Acceleration checked, and when I unchecked it, the installation proceeded without issues. You can see that the window warns you at the bottom to change a setting (Non-optimal Settings detected.)
I also changed the Video Memory to 64MB instead of the allocated 16MB. The installation went perfectly well after these minor changes, and the machine starts and shuts down promptly. Faster than a typical boot or shut down on a stand alone machine, for sure. It is also much quicker than having to log out of OS X and use Boot Camp. The price is right at $0.00, and if you find the need for Windows this might be the best solution out there on a budget.
Stop error c0000218 Hive file Corrupted or Missing
Posted by technohermit in Boot Problems, Uncategorized, Virus Issues, Windows on 2009/11/11
I was searching around for this error on an older Dell 8300 running Windows XP. It seems Microsoft’s KB Article doesn’t have a fix for someone with an OEM installation of Windows XP. Also, it doesn’t mention anything about the SECURITY file mentioned in my stop error message.
The problem here was a pretty bad virus infection. What I was able to do to fix it and get Windows to boot, was to pull the drive and connect it to another Windows machine and run chkdsk. I probably could have used my XP Pro CD and run chkdsk from the Recovery Console, but I’m going off the assumption that if you have an OEM CD, this feature may not be available to you. If you have it, run chkdsk /f at the command line. Otherwise, connect the drive to another machine running XP or better via USB and run it from there. To access the drive, you need a USB enclosure and a computer running XP, Vista, or 7.
In Windows, type Windows Key+E to access Explorer. Find your newly connected drive in the left-hand column and right-click to open the menu. Click on Properties. Click the Tools tab, and then click Check Now. Be sure to check for bad sectors and file structure errors, even though it takes a little longer for the sectors check…mine had bad sectors. After it finishes, if it’s found and corrected the errors, you should be able to boot into XP when you reinstall the drive to the problematic computer. From there, be sure to pick up Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware and either Kaspersky Anti-Virus or NOD32 Anti-Virus, as you probably have a case of the virus blues.
I highly recommend you get Dr Web’s LiveCD, a bootable anti-virus disk. The image you download will be in .iso format, so be sure you can burn it to a CD from the computer you are using. I assume, if you’re reading this, you do have access to a bootable computer 
There are a few things you should do, once you get your computer back to running condition.
First, get off Internet Explorer! Use a browser such as Firefox or Google Chrome.
Second, be sure to get yourself a paid for subscription to one of the above mentioned anti-virus programs. Obviously the one you are (or lack of one, for that matter) using isn’t effective. Good luck getting up and running, and thanks for reading!
