Infusion Technology Solutions Blog – Page 31 – Technology related solutions, tips, tricks, and other interesting topics

VMware – Increase Virtual Disk Size

Sometimes you create a VMware image and later realize that you should have made the drive size larger. Fortunately in VMWare Workstation you can change the size of a disk with a simple command line program. But the command only makes your drive bigger not the actual partition the operating system resides on. It is possible to get around this problem without purchasing a product like Partition Magic. There is a free program from the OpenSource and Linux world called “QTParted”. So the first thing you need to do is resize the drive by issuing the VMware command line to resize the disk (in this case to 10Gb):

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 10GB myDisk.vmdk

Then you set the VMware session to boot off a Knoppix ISO CD image. Then run QTParted. Select the Windows Drive partition with the right mouse button and chose reseize, set the new size, and then commit the change. Your disk’s OS partition has now been increased with all data intact.

10.5 Leopard – How to Enable the Root User

Open the Directory Utility application which is located in the Applications | Utilities folder. You may have to unlock the Directory Utility application to make changes. Once it’s unlocked, go to Edit | Enable Root User, and then type in a password for your root user. You can now use the root user, and the ‘Other Users’ option now shows up on the login window.

10.5 Leopard – “Disk error” After Installing Windows Using Boot Camp Assistant

Problem: After running Boot Camp Assistant and doing an initial install of Windows, you get the error message “Press any key to boot from CD. Disk Error. Press any key to restart.” when initially booting into the Windows partition after Windows setup completes. This problem is described in this apple support document: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306504

Solution: You need to actually reformat the Windows partition that Boot Camp created. It will be the parition named “BOOTCAMP”. IMPORTANT: Do not use the option named “Leave the current file system intact (no changes)”. Choose to either format the BOOTCAMP partition as either NTFS or FAT format. If you format the partition in NTFS format, you will not be able to write to the drive while booted into OS X. You will have read-only access to it. However if you choose to format the drive as FAT then you will be able to both read and write to the Windows drive while booted into OS X. The advantage of NTFS is that it gives you finer grain control on file access and there is also a performance improvement.

How to Manually Turn On an ATX Power Supply

There isn’t a traditional power-on switch on ATX computer power supplies so if you need to test one you need to jumper two pins on the power supply cable. You can use a bent paper clip to act as the jumper. Jumper the green and black wires which are pins 13 and 14 on a 20-pin ATX power supply. More details about ATX power supply wiring can be found at this link.