Resizing Virtual Disk Size Under Virtualbox 4 and Higher

In the earlier versions(< 4), there was not any direct method of resizing the size of virtual box disk however with the release of Virtualbox 4 and higher, the VBoxManage tool can be easily used to resize the vbox disks.

Open the terminal and navigate to the folder that contains your Vbox disk and just type the following command and in few secs, you are done.

VBoxManage modifyhd filename.vdi --resize 30720

The above command will resize the filename.vdi disk to 30 GB(30GB = 30*1024 = 30720).

If you are running virtualbox version less than 4, then you will have to create a bigger virtual disk and then clone the content from the existing virtual disk. You can freely download the disk cloning/backup tools for cloning. I hope this helps.


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Virtual Box 4.1 Is Out

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.


Oracle today released VirtualBox 4.1, a new major release. Introducing VM clones, increased capability for very large hosts, and Windows Aero support. You can view the Changelog in this version.

For downloads, check this link.

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Converting VMWare .vmdk to Virtualbox .vdi

I was downloading the metasploitable to play around with it and I found that it was the VMWare .vmdk file so I had to convert it into .vdi file to run under the virtualbox. This post will show you how to easily convert the .vmdk file into .vdi file.

Converting the vmware disk file to the virtualbox hdd file is not the difficult task but still many might not be knowing how to do that. In order to convert your .vmdk file to .vdi, you need to type the following command in the terminal by first changing the terminal to the proper directory.


VBoxManage clonehd --format VDI metasploitable.vmdk metasploitable.vdi


Note that you need to have virtualbox installed for this to work. I hope this helps. :)

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How to fix the USB support in virtualbox

I installed virtualbox 4 after removing the OSE version and I tried to test the USB support. But I didn't find it working so I tried few things. And on diving to the internet, I figured out that I must be the member of the group "vboxusers" to be able to have USB support in my virtualbox.

Follow the steps as stated below:

1) Go to System->Administration->Users and groups. You'll see the screen like below:

2) From there, click on Manage groups and then select the vboxusers group and edit its property. Now in the properties window, check your username as marked for the group. The screenshot below would clarify you.

Alternatively this all could be achieved by a simple command as below(Here, we are adding the user "samar" to the group vboxusers):

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo useradd -G vboxusers samar

In order to verify that everything went well, you could type in terminal:

samar@Techgaun:~$ grep vboxusers /etc/group

3) Now you will have to restart(or just logout from your account) and then re-login to your account. Now virtualbox will allow you to use USB devices. When your virtual machine is on, just go to Devices->USB devices and select the one that needs to be active.

I hope this helps you. :)


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Installing Damn Vulnerable Linux under virtualbox

I had some problems while installing Damn Vulnerable Linux under virtualbox so I thought I would share the process I did to instal the DVL with virtualbox. I won't be going into the details of what the DVL is, anyway.

First, with the .iso file or the DVD drive, boot with the live DVD of Damn Vulnerable Linux(DVL) and login as root. Now we will prepare partition using fdisk utility. Follow the steps as i describe below:

-> Type startx to start the GUI for DVL.

-> Under konsole, type fdisk /dev/hda. Replace hda with the appropriate disk like /dev/sda for you.

-> Now you'll get the following prompt:
command (m for help):
type the letter n and press enter.
then type the letter p to create a primary partition and type 1 again.
Then type a and then type 1 to make the partition bootable. Finally type w to write the partition table.

-> Now we will format the newly created partition by entering the following command:
mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1 Replace with the proper device like hda2 or sda1...You might need to restart the VM sometimes before or maybe after doing this.

-> now we create the folders to mount our hdd and DVL iso.

mkdir /mnt/dvl/
mkdir /mnt/iso/


-> Next we mount the hard drive and iso as below:

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dvl/
mount /dev/hdc /mnt/iso/


-> The prepartion phase is over. Now lets start the backtrack installer from application menu(Be ReSlaxed > System > Backtrack Installer)

-> Now configure the installer as shown below:
Source(Backtrack CD): /mnt/iso/
Install BackTrack to: /mnt/dvl/
Write MBR to: /dev/hda
Installation Method: Real

Next click on install and wait for the installation and copying of the Damn Vulnerable Linux.

-> Finally enter the following commands in terminal:

chroot /mnt/dvl/ /bin/bash
lilo -v
reboot


Now remove the DVD/.iso file and you should have your DVL installed in your virtual machine.

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Accessing shared folders of host system from Backtrack4(virtual)

As the title of the post says, this post will help you to access the shared folders. The example is based on the Backtrack 4 installed as virtual OS with VirtualBox OSE under ubuntu 10.10 but there should not be problem in other systems too as long as the virtual OS is linux-based.

From the VirtualBox menu, Device->Shared Folders, you can add, edit and remove the shared folders that are shared by the host OS with the virtual OS.

Now onto the main problem, just enter the following command in order to successfully access the shared folders from within the BT4.

mount -t vboxsf /mnt

For example, if I share the folder $HOME/Desktop, I would do following in the BT4 konsole.

mount -t vboxsf Desktop /mnt

Note that if the windows system is the host OS, then I think you should include your shared folders as the Transient folder (anyone to make sure of this?) instead of the Machine Folders.
That's all. I hope this helps you.

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