VMware Workstation 7 in Windows 7: Error Moving File or Folder

I had just started using Windows XP SP3 as a guest in VMware Workstation 7.1 on a Windows 7 host.  It seemed that I was getting a certain error every time I tried to move files from one folder to another.  Both the target and source drives were on network drives, in the VMware sense:  they were local drives on that computer, but they were not part of the actual virtual machine (VM) as drive C was, so Workstation considered them network drives.  When I attempted to paste these files into a folder on that other drive, I got this error message:

Error Moving File or Folder

Cannot move [filename]: It is being used by another person or program.

Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.

These files were not in use anywhere, as far as I could tell.  I was using a utility called Unlocker.  When this kind of error would occur, Unlocker would pop up, provide relevant information, and offer to help.  In this case, Unlocker's message was, "No locking handle found."  This was not absolutely the last word on the subject, but I had found Unlocker to be pretty reliable.

This was happening every time I tried to move files.  It was not a problem with one particular troublesome file.  It happened with moving files, not with deleting them.  I was able to delete files, and copy files; I just couldn't move files.  I had done a global change of file properties so that none were read-only.  This inability to move files occurred on all network drives.

I did a search on this error.  Very few results turned up.  I posted a question on it in a VMware forum.  One of the results from the search led to a lot of instances where people were getting the same or a similar error message in non-VM contexts.  Some of the advice offered in those kinds of situations involved one-off solutions, where there was a particularly troublesome file.  Someone suggested trying to do this as administrator, but I was already running as administrator.

That last person remarked that the errors s/he was experiencing may have resulted from changing the host name on the computer.  This was not a newly created VM.  I had used it in Workstation for Linux, to run WinXP on an Ubuntu host on a separate computer.  When I brought it over to this computer and fired it up, Workstation asked whether I had copied or moved it.  I said I moved it.  So possibly what was happening was that Workstation remained confused about some aspect of the machine due to the fact that it was not a virgin WinXP creation.

To explore this possibility, I closed down this VM and started up another.  I didn't want to spend the time to create a whole new WinXP installation in a VM.  What I did instead was to choose a preexisting VM that had different origins.  So now I felt that I should clarify the genealogy of this thing.  This troublesome VM was not actually created in Workstation.  It was created by VMware Converter.  I had used Converter to convert a native WinXP installation into a VM that I then used in Workstation for Linux.

I did have another WinXP VM that I had created in Workstation for Linux -- installing Windows XP from scratch inside a virtual machine, that is, rather than installing it on a regular computer and then converting it.  So that was the one I tried using now.  The problem did not occur there.  These differences in origins may have explained the difference in behavior.  It may also have had something to do with the differences in size.  The converted native machine was twice the size of the born-in-virtual machine.  Its size itself may have been an issue, or there may have been a problem with some program that I had installed within that larger machine.

VMware Workstation 7.1 Unrecoverable Error

I was using VMware Workstation 7.1 on Ubuntu 10.04 with a Windows XP SP3 guest.  I had a WinXP virtual machine (VM) open, and suddenly it crashed, with this error message:

VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (mks)
Unexpected signal: 11.
A log file is available in "/media/VMS/VMware VMs/WXMUProjectC/vmware.log". Please request support and include the contents of the log file.

To collect data to submit to VMware support, select Help > About and click "Collect Support Data". You can also run the "vm-support" script in the Workstation folder directly.
We will respond on the basis of your support entitlement.

I pursued that option, but it turned out I didn't have a support entitlement, so I turned to this process of researching the solution on my own.  I had gotten a similar error message once before.  I wasn't entirely sure what I had done to solve the problem in that case, other than to keep flailing around until something clicked.  But as I reviewed that previous post, I did recall a different error message that I had gotten when starting the VM.  I started it again and saw this in the lower right-hand corner:

Could not connect Ethernet0 to virtual network "/dev/vmnet8"
More information can be foun din the vmware.log file.
Virtual device Ethernet0 will start disconnected.

I tried a search for that error and came across some possible answers.  One was just to reboot, but I had already done that.  Another was to use the Virtual Network Editor.  I found a VMware video on that.  It told me that vmnet8 was associated with NAT, which was the kind of network connection I had selected in VM > Settings > Hardware tab > Network Adapter.  The video then started to talk about adding a network adapter.

It seemed that this could have two implications for me.  First, I had just put a network interface card (NIC) into the computer, as an alternative to the motherboard's onboard network connector.  I had done that in an attempt to deal with a networking problem that turned out to be just a bad cable.  I did think that, previously, I had been getting the second error message previously, the one just quoted, "Could not connect Ethernet0."  But I had not been getting the crashes previously.  So probably I could fix that error by just removing the unnecessary NIC, instead of trying to figure out how to configure it as described in the video.  Second, I had preserved my Ubuntu /home directory during this most recent installation of Ubuntu.  I had also recently installed a new motherboard.  Possibly the settings that I had saved in that /home directory were still dreaming of the old days, with the previous motherboard; perhaps I would have to configure the VM's ethernet adapter anyway, so as to make it comfortable with the new motherboard.

I started by shutting down the machine, removing that unnecessary NIC, and restarting.  (Before shutting down, I checked Ubuntu's System > Administration > Update Manager, just in case there were updates that would make my life easier in unknown ways.)  I powered up the VM.  No Ethernet0 error message.  OK, one problem solved.  Would it crash?  I worked with the VM for a couple of days, but then it did crash again.  It seemed that the frequency of the crashes was much reduced, so maybe removing the NIC helped.

This time, I took a look at the log file.  It was in the folder containing the other files for the VM, including the .vmdk file, and it was named simply "vmware.log."  It contained a large number of entries, going back days, including what looked like several hundred, at the end of the file, that all occurred within the last second before the crash.  The first one in that last second was "Caught signal 11 -- tid 3652."  There hadn't been any others for several minutes before that, and I also noticed that the "11" was the same number as appeared in the error message onscreen (quoted above).  This did seem to be the beginning of the end.  After that "Caught signal 11" message, there in the log file, I saw many repetitions of a few other types of messages, like these:

mks| SIGNAL: stack B6CE1AE0 : [etc.]
mks| Backtrace[0] [etc.]
mks| SymBacktrace[0] [etc.]
mks| Panic: dropping lock (was bug 49968)
mks| Unexpected signal: 11.
mks| Core dump limit is 0 KB.
mks| Child process 19031 failed to dump core (status 0x6).

mks| Backtrace[0] [etc.]
mks| SymBacktrace[0] [etc.]

where [etc.] refers to various sets of computer gibberish (e.g., 0xb7823410).  It went on from there, but now we seemed to be at the point of no return, where the log showed VMware giving me the "Unexpected signal" error message onscreen.  A search led to a thread in which people were saying that they avoided this error by tinkering with their screen resolution.  When I saw that, I figured that we were talking about a kind of general reaction to somewhat incompatible hardware:  could be the NIC, could be the screen resolution, etc.

I had noticed that this particular crash occurred when I used my KVM to switch from the computer in question to a different computer.  It was a new KVM, an IOGear GCS72U.  I had previously been using a PS/2 KVM without problems, but my new motherboard did not have two PS/2 sockets, so I had to switch to this USB KVM.  Had I installed the KVM before or after taking out the NIC?  I couldn't remember.  But the KVM was a suspect.

Another suspect was the keyboard.  I had also had to get a new keyboard and mouse -- because, of course, I was using PS/2 devices previously, and now I had to have USB devices.  It was an inexpensive keyboard, a Logitech K120, and I had noticed that it did not work consistently on the other computer.  It would be working fine, and then there would suddenly be no more keyboard input.  The mouse was still working, but not the keyboard.  At that point, it didn't matter whether the keyboard was connected to that other computer through the KVM or was plugged into it directly; either way, it wouldn't work.  But I hadn't done a scientific study to determine whether it was the keyboard or the USB KVM that was screwing up.

So, putting it together, what had happened in this case was that I was using VMware on computer no. 1 (C1).  The keyboard and mouse had been working fine on both C1 and C2.  I hit the KVM switch button to move to C2.  That's when VMware crashed; and at the same time, suddenly the keyboard was not working on C2.  But the USB mouse would still work.  So it seemed that either the keyboard or the KVM was sending a funky keyboard-related signal to C2.

C2 was an older system, and I was in the process of upgrading it, and I thought that might solve the problem.  But in the meantime, I plugged my old PS/2 keyboard into C2 and rebooted, with the new keyboard and KVM still connected to both computers.  In this setup, over a period of days, I observed that the PS/2 keyboard continued to work consistently throughout, but the USB keyboard would sometimes stop working on C2, like before.

Then I had another VMware crash on C1, and that made me decide to try another angle.  I unplugged the KVM from C2.  By this time, I had replaced C2; now it was pretty much the same computer as C1 (same kind of motherboard, CPU, and case).  So now the mouse and keyboard connected to the KVM would work only on C1.  On C2, I kept using the PS/2 keyboard, and added a USB mouse.  If there were still crashes or freezes, I would have a better idea of whether the problem was the new USB keyboard or the new USB KVM.  At this writeup, a couple of weeks later, my recollection was that I did not have any further crashes.

I decided to send the KVM back to IOGear.  In the interim, I connected my old PS/2 KVM to both computers, and used it only with the PS/2 keyboard.  So now I had a separate USB mouse for each computer, but only one keyboard for both of them.  It took a while to get used to switching mice when I switched the keyboard from one computer to the other, but the point here is that there were no further crashes.  I had to wait for the replacement KVM to arrive from IOGear before I could say for sure whether it was the keyboard or the KVM; but by that point I had decided to stop using VMware on Ubuntu,

Windows 7 as Host: Choosing a Virtualization Program

I had previously used VMware Workstation to run Windows XP in a virtual machine (VM) on Ubuntu Linux.  Now I was switching from Ubuntu to Windows 7.  I had found that WinXP was actually more stable in a VM than when running natively.  I also didn't want to go cold-turkey from WinXP; that is, I wanted to continue to have access to my familiar programs and other arrangements until Win7 felt natural.

I couldn't use my Linux-based copy of Workstation on Win7, so I would have to come up with a new virtualization tool.  I didn't want to shell out for another copy of Workstation.  I wondered if there were good free alternatives that would let me run WinXP in a VM on Win7.  I did a search, viewed some random remarks, and came up with some comparisons of several leading virtualization products.  These comparisons confirmed my sense that the main free contenders were Microsoft Virtual PC, Sun Virtual Box, and VMware Player.

Looking first at comparisons against Virtual PC, one reviewer suggested that Virtual PC was easiest for a purely Windows setup like mine, Virtual Box was more oriented toward Linux hosts, and Player was the most popular.  Another reviewer said that VirtualBox and VMware Workstation (not necessarily Player) had more advanced customization options, such as unity mode, snapshots, USB drive support, the ability to move VMs, and the option of allocating two CPU cores.  Another reviewer, comparing VirtualBox and Virtual PC, found that Virtual PC had the advantage of presumably greater Microsoft compatibility, better disk technology, a free WinXP license, support for Win7 and Vista guests, lower resource consumption on host, and easier physical drive configuration.  He favored VirtualBox nonetheless, though, because he found that VirtualBox supported more operating systems (especially Linux and Mac), supported 64-bit guests and multiple processor cores (i.e., better performance) as well as multiple kinds of virtual disks, and offered snapshots, unity mode, remote display, and 3D support.  Another reviewer, offering a video demonstration, said Virtual PC was better in supporting Aero, automatic login, USB device sharing, and integration into Windows Explorer (which he actually disliked), but favored VirtualBox for running on multiple operating systems and for other reasons stated by some of the other reviewers.  In short, there seemed to be some consensus that Virtual PC was the worst of the three.  I did a quick search to see if perchance Microsoft had upgraded it recently.  It didn't seem to have done so.

At about this point, I realized that probably I could continue to use my copy of VMware Workstation for Linux to make virtual machines containing WinXP, and use those in Player on a Win7 host.  So I wasn't sure if I should be comparing VirtualBox against VMware Player or Workstation.  I found both sorts of comparisons.  In what were probably the most professional reviews I saw, PCMag rated Workstation 6.0 (I was now using 7.1) at 4.5 stars, versus 3.5 for Virtual Box.  (At this writing, Workstation was on sale for $142 (with a free copy of VMware ThinApp Starter Edition thrown in) instead of its usual $189.)  One of the reviewers cited above encountered freezes in VirtualBox, and found that Workstation was the best performer.  She reported large differences in size between Workstation (~500MB) and the other two (~40MB), presumably reflecting more sophistication but also more resource demands in the former.  Another reviewer also compared VirtualBox against VMware Player.  He found VirtualBox faster in the guest, less burdensome for the host, and better in snapshots; but inferior in networking, and in support for Windows Aero, USB, 64-bit CPUs, and hardware virtualization.  Another reviewer favored VirtualBox because (s/he claimed) it was free, open source, more frequently patched, used fewer resources, ran faster, resumed faster, and was able to use its competitor's VMs.  The remark (above) that VirtualBox was more oriented toward Linux hosts was echoed in my own previous look at VirtualBox, where I cited a source indicating that VIrtualBox did far better in Linux hosts.

It seemed that VMware was ahead of the game or at least a solid contender in most ways, but that it was not a clear and obvious winner, especially when price was considered.  Having already played with VirtualBox a bit, and having learned VMware's approach, it seemed that I should start with whatever I could pull together from Workstation and Player.  If I ran into performance issues with a Windows host as I had with an Ubuntu host, maybe then it would be time -- especially before investing another $140-190 in VMware -- to give VirtualBox a more extended look, and that might also be true if I reached the point of having to build another WinXP VM from scratch.  I could do that in VirtualBox, and in that event might find it a relatively problem-free alternative.

Before proceeding to try VMware Player in a Windows host with my existing VMware VMs that I had created using Workstation on a Linux host, I looked into the recollection that VMware Server was also free.  Posts in one thread said that Server could create VMs too, but was not as fast as Player and did not have as many capabilities for an already existing VM.  I found EasyVMX.com and gathered that there were other ways to make VMs as well, though there didn't seem to be a point in doing so unless if I had been short of system resources to run Server.

I discovered at this point that VMware offered another free virtualization product, called the VMware vSphere Hypervisor, or ESXi for short.  This one differed from the others in being a "bare metal" hypervisor -- that is, not requiring a host at all.  In other words, I would install this first, before installing the operating system, and then I could install one or more operating systems, each in its own VM, without devoting resources to non-virtualization services being provided by the host (though it began to sound like ESXi would only run one operating system at a time).  In the long run, this sort of thing could be the end of dual-booting, and I could have Ubuntu, Win7, WinXP, and any other operating systems ready to run as needed, including those already packaged in free VMware appliances.  ESXi was said to offer better performance than Server.  It wasn't clear that it could be made to work on a PC as distinct from a dedicated server, though.  VMware's Hardware Compatibility Guide was not going to provide information for my puny little AMD Athlon (as distinct from Opteron or Xeon) CPU.  Another source made it sound like a home PC could run it, though.  Managing ESXi seemed to be the sticking point; for example, VMware's ESXi Management Kit cost $995.  Veeam offered a free ESXi manager, but there appeared to be a network administrator type of learning curve involved here.  Some people seemed to be using a minimal Linux to manage it.  It also sounded like there might be an ESXi manager within ESXi itself.  Apparently part of the reason Server was slower was that it was more user-friendly.  The purpose of the free ESXi seemed to be to get new system administrators into the VMware world and ready to upgrade to more powerful VMware server products.  Apparently there were ways to run ESXi in Workstation in Windows 7, but this seemed like the opposite of a bare-metal approach.  Basically, I liked the idea of a bare-metal hypervisor, but the sparse results I was getting on my searches told me that I was looking into something that was not happening for end users, at least not yet.  It could be done, but servers remained something that other people used for other purposes.

I wasn't quite ready to give up on the idea of a bare-metal hypervisor for home use, so I did another search.  Brad Maltz gave me a nice chart to compare the options.  His bottom line:  "You can expect plenty of hurdles and years for perfecting this technology, but the client-side hypervisor is the catalyst to many greater things to come."  My goal for the coming months, it seemed, would be to continue to focus on the usual multi-layered host-virtualization-guest scenario.  For that purpose, I would start with VMware Player and my existing VMs.  If I needed to adjust them, I would try to do so in either Workstation for Linux or Server.  If I had to build a new VM, I would consider doing it in VirtualBox as an alternative to Workstation or Server.

Two Computers: Dividing the Workload

In this post, as part of my New Year's housecleaning, I introduce several investigations, involving various ways of setting up two computers in a workspace.

*  *  *  *  *

KVMs and Monitor-Sharing Options

I had developed the habit of working with two computers, using a KVM switch so I needed only one mouse and keyboard.  A KVM switch would let me use just one monitor with two computers:  it would be showing me what was happening on the computer that the mouse and keyboard were then connected to.

I had two monitors.  I didn't have them connected to the KVM.  Instead, I connected them directly to the two computers, one for each.  So the KVM switch would have me working on computer A or computer B, but monitor A would continue to show what was happening on computer A, and monitor B would continue to display the state of things on computer B.

Actually, one KVM had started malfunctioning, and I had replaced it with another.  In the process, I decided to disconnect the mouse from the KVM too.  So now the KVM just controlled the keyboard.  It made sense:  the keyboard was big.  I couldn't fit two keyboards on my desktop.  But I could fit two mice.  Mouse A, on the left side, was controlled by my left hand, and was controlling computer A, while mouse B was preoccupied with computer B on my right.  I wasn't sure if I liked this arrangement.  It had its advantages.  It gave my hands a more equal workout.  I could glance over at the other computer and click something, to make some process move ahead, without having to hit ScrollLock twice, which was how the KVM switched the keyboard back and forth.  The main problem was that it was hard to tell which computer the keyboard was controlling at any given time.  I was still occasionally hitting the Del key and deleting things on computer A and wondering why they weren't disappearing from monitor B.  It was a bit nutty.  But I was adapting and, like I say, it had its advantages, at least until I worked out something better.

The monitor situation was OK, too.  I had widescreen monitors, so I was able to accommodate a couple of different open windows at the same time on each of them.  But there were times when it would have been helpful to have both monitors attuned to just one computer.  I had previously used an arrangement where monitor A was dedicated to computer A, but monitor B was connected to a second KVM switch, so I could reach up and punch the button and switch monitor B back and forth between computer A and computer B.  This would let me use a multiple monitor approach on computer A, so as to spread out my work.  The problem with this was that, when there was no monitor turned on to computer B, I tended not to use it.  That was a problem because the purpose of having two computers was to let me continue to work when one of them would crash or need maintenance or get involved in some process, like scanning or rendering, that would make it virtually unavailable for other purposes.  I also used this arrangement to write these blog posts, tinkering with one machine and recording the steps in the other.  I found that, if I got too fixated on one computer, the other one tended not to be organized and capable enough to take over when I needed it.

There didn't seem to be a way to share one monitor between two computers simultaneously, with computer B running in a little window in the corner -- a real "monitor" as distinct from a big display.  There was the option of buying a little display, connecting it to the second DVI connector on computer B, and putting it off to the side, so I would always have that information about what was happening on computer B.  But that little monitor would cost more than $100.  I could probably go down to Goodwill and pick up an old CRT for less than $10, but the other problem was that it would still be more clutter, more heat, more power consumption.  And the desk didn't have room for it, so it would have to go onto a side table or shelf or something.  I would also need a video card, since my motherboard only supported one monitor.

A decision on that question of how to use multiple monitors would await the outcome of an investigation of various non-KVM strategies.

*  *  *  *  *

Dual-Booting and Virtual Machines

Over the past couple of years, my two computers had different missions.  Computer A was running Windows XP in a VMware virtual machine on Ubuntu.  Computer B was running WinXP natively.  Now I was moving away from Ubuntu and back to Windows.  I had planned to just install Windows 7 on both.  I'd been having problems with my WinXP installation on computer B, even when I restored from an image, so it seemed like a good time to upgrade rather than continue to fight it.

I liked the idea of dual-booting WinXP and Win7.  Actually, though, I rarely used my dual-boot setups.  I pretty much always went with one or the other.  Right now, for instance, I already had a dual-boot Ubuntu and WinXP setup on computer B, but I couldn't remember the last time I had gone into Ubuntu there.

Meanwhile, on computer A, it seemed like I should consider just replacing Ubuntu with Win7:  continue to run WinXP in a virtual machine (VM), that is, but run it on Windows 7 instead of Ubuntu.  This would give me access to the familiar way of doing things in WinXP, while easing the transition to Win7.  I looked into the VM option in more detail.  It looked like I would be able to use the Windows version of VMware Workstation as long as I wasn't using my Workstation license in Ubuntu.  So the tentative plan was to have WinXP running in VMware on Win7 on one machine, while just running Windows (either XP or 7) natively (i.e., without a VM) on the other.

Although I was moving away from Ubuntu, it occurred to me that this strategy would leave a door open for a possible return to Ubuntu.  Ubuntu had been far more stable than WinXP.  Assuming the virtualization setup worked, I could install Ubuntu as a VM on Win7, essentially reversing what I had tried to do previously, and I could thus continue to identify projects and programs that Ubuntu could handle just as well as Windows for my purposes.

*  *  *  *  *

Differences Between Machines

The decisions described above meant that, contrary to my assumptions, I probably should not set up identical hardware on both computers.  Computer A was probably going to need more muscle to handle the VMs.  WinXP on computer B had been struggling to run video editing software, though that may have been due to a flawed installation.

Part of the tradeoff here was simplicity versus options.  The more operating systems and hardware arrangements I had in play, the more different ways I had of configuring things, and the more time it would take.  I had always viewed the computer hobbying as a means to an end of being more productive, while having its own intrinsic interest too, and for that reason I had tended to think, in recent years, in terms of getting myself set up for the next six months or a year.  During that kind of timeframe, the problems of a setup would tend to emerge and sometimes become overwhelming.  The current Windows XP installation was a case in point.  I had been able to nurse it along despite its obvious dysfunctionality, occasionally replacing its current state with an Acronis image backup, but it was now crashing one or more times per day.  So, oddly, in this case it was the simpler installation that had become the more problematic.

The switch from Windows XP to Windows 7 probably meant that I would be spending quite a bit of time getting up to speed on the best way to configure the latter.  I was probably going to install it in a RAID array, for purposes of performance, with an external backup option.  There would be some things to figure out and play with.  Most likely, some hardware would be getting shuffled around.  So, contrary to my first thoughts during this particular housecleaning, it did not appear likely that the two computers would take on any clear definition:  they would not be mirror images of one another, in hardware terms, so as to simplify maintenance, and they would also not feature one being considerably more powerful than the other.  The plan for the coming six months to a year was just to make them both capable and to explore options without investing more time than I wanted to spare for this kind of project.

Since I was now in a period of computer housecleaning, it seemed likely that my posts over the next few weeks would explore these considerations in more detail.

Farewell, Ubuntu

I first started looking into Linux in the 1990s.  I have been playing, and then subsequently relying on, Ubuntu since I started this blog in 2007.  And now I may be going away from Ubuntu, and Linux, for a while.

My situation is that, throughout this time, I have had work to do.  There were always applications or capabilities that I was using in Windows that I could not yet match in Ubuntu.  As a transitional step, I bought VMware Workstation and ran that on Ubuntu, so that I could use those Windows applications in Windows XP virtual machines while continuing to become more familiar with Ubuntu.  And this worked.  I did become fairly comfortable with Ubuntu.  I have spent what must have been hundreds of hours researching, tinkering, and troubleshooting, as shown in many posts in this blog.  The performance was never as good as on the Windows machine.  But it was a good arrangement nonetheless.

During the past year or so, unfortunately, VMware or the underlying Ubuntu installation grew flaky.  I reinstalled both a couple of times.  It just wasn't working.  The VM was working so slowly, even with faster hardware and a fair amount of attention to performance tweaks.  I still don't know why.  If I knew, I would fix it, because one odd thing I noticed was that Windows XP running in a VMware Workstation virtual machine was vastly more stable than Windows XP running in native mode.

Right now, there are too many things that I still can't do in Linux.  The promise has been a long time in coming, and it's still not here.  I will probably keep a dual-boot on at least one computer, and I may find that I need it sometimes, for some purposes.  I got to the point where installing and tweaking Ubuntu was a lot faster and easier than doing so in Windows.  I like Ubuntu.  But at the end of the day, I need my software to work.  So, for now, I am going back to Windows.

Microsoft Word 2003: "Saving the Autorecovery File is Postponed"

I was using Microsoft Word 2003 in Windows XP.  In Tools > Options > Save, I had checked the box next to "Save AutoRecover info" and had set it to save every 1 minute.  I got a dialog that said, "Saving the AutoRecovery file is postponed for '[filename].'"  I clicked OK on that.  A minute later, it was back.  I clicked OK on it again.  I was able to use File > Save to save the document.  The dialog kept coming back.

I did a search for that message.  The first thread advised me to uncheck the "Save AutoRecover info" box, exit Word, search for all files beginning with ~$ or ending with .tmp, and delete them.  In Windows XP's classic mode, I went into Start > Search > For Files or Folders and searched on the Windows XP program partition (i.e., drive C, where Word 2003 was installed, as distinct from the separate partition where I stored my data) for ~$*.* .  I selected all of the files found.  I held down the Shift key and pressed the Delete key.  I re-ran the search and Shift-Del until there were no ~$*.* files left.  I did the same search and deletion process for *.tmp.  I confirmed file deletion even when I got a message indicating that one of the files being deleted was a system file.  There was one file I was not able to delete because it was "being used by another person or program."  I restarted Word and turned AutoRecover back on.  A minute later, the "AutoRecovery is postponed" message was back.  So that fix had not worked for me.

I had had this problem on a previous installation, so I did not try the advice of uninstalling and reinstalling Word.  The same thread advised me that perhaps Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.0 was the problem.  I closed Word and went into Acrobat > Help > Check for Updates.  It said the updater was already running, so I looked at the system tray (bottom right corner of the screen), right-clicked on the Adobe icon, and told it to install the update.  When that was done, I didn't restart Acrobat, lest it be the problem; I just closed it.  I restarted Word.  A minute later, the "AutoRecovery is postponed" message was back.

Another possibility suggested by that thread was that Word could be thrown off-balance by a change of drive letters or removing a hard drive.  I did not remember if I had changed anything of that nature since installing Word, and thus did not know how to go about fixing it if this was the problem.  In other WinXP problems related to drive letter errors, I had sometimes plugged in a USB drive and, using Start > Run > drivemgmt.msc, had relettered the USB drive to replace the offending or missing drive letter, and then rebooted, and that had solved the problem.  Possibly I could have resolved the problem in this case by working my way through the alphabet of drive letter possibilities until the problem went away.

I noticed another possibility mentioned in that same thread.  I had used Control Panel > System > Advanced tab > Performance Settings > Advanced tab > Virtual memory > Change to put my paging file on a partition other than drive C.  I had done this in the impression that this would make WinXP run faster and would also spare me from having to include several gigabytes' worth of paging file in my backups of drive C.  I decided to leave the paging file on that other partition, but I changed it from a fixed size to the "System managed size" option.  That required a reboot.  After the reboot, the problem was still there, so I tried putting the paging file back on C as system-managed, and rebooted again.  That didn't fix it either; the "AutoRecovery is postponed" message was back again.

I wondered if I had erred in deleting the *.tmp and ~$*.* files only from drive C.  My AutoRecover location was on a different partition.  I killed Word and, this time, just in case, hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and made sure that no Word processes were running. I re-ran the search, this time including that other partition.  But there were none of those kinds of files on that partition.  I ran the searches again, this time searching My Computer entirely.

It occurred to me, about this time, that the problem might be that I was putting my AutoRecover files on a drive other than C.  It wasn't a network drive -- but then, actually, it was:  I was doing this within a VMware virtual machine (VM), and VMware Workstation treated even a local hard drive as a network drive.  This, I thought, would explain why I was getting all those ~*.* files in the folder where I was saving my Word documents:  the "network" location was not being accepted.  I went into Word > Tools > Options > File Locations and changed the location to a folder on drive C, and then restarted Word.  That seemed to do it.  Ten minutes later, the error message had not returned.

Acronis True Image Plus Pack: Converting a Virtual Machine to a Physical Machine

I was using Windows XP as the guest operating system in a virtual machine (VM) on VMware Workstation 7.1, running on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).  I had developed a customized WinXP installation in that VM.  Now I wanted to install that same tweaked version in physical form, as a dual-boot option on that computer.  I did not want to go through all of the time-consuming steps that had been required to create that tweaked installation.  I hoped, instead, that it would be possible somehow to convert the VM to a physical installation.  This post describes what I tried and learned in that effort.

The fact that both the VM and the physical dual-boot installation would be on the same computer did not necessarily make things easier.  VMware VMs used virtual hardware that did not match my physical hardware.  In other words, simply making an image of the VM and restoring it to the physical machine would run into the same problems as if I made an image on one physical computer and restored it on another.  That's not to say it couldn't be done.  It would just require more than a simple image-and-restore procedure.

There seemed to be a couple of different ways to go.  Through a search, I found that VMware itself offered a virtual-to-physical (V2P) conversion procedure.  This would permit conversion of the .vmdk file directly to a physical installation.  That procedure was quite complex, however, and that meant there could be quite a few ways in which it might not go exactly according to plan.  There was also the problem that, according to the detailed description, they had not actually tested it on Windows XP.  It seemed that it might be worth investing the time in this procedure if I were going to do this frequently.  A quick glance suggested that many of the steps would only be hard or time-consuming the first time around.  For my purposes, though, I was not sure that this would be much faster than just reinstalling Windows from scratch, and it would probably be less reliable.

What looked more promising was to try the Universal Restore feature of Acronis True Image 2011 (ATI).  Universal Restore was available through the Plus Pack that had to be purchased in addition to ATI itself.  The combination of ATI and Plus Pack, together, would cost around $80 unless you got it on sale.  The general concept seemed to be that you would install ATI, install the Plus Pack, create a bootable ATI CD (or USB drive) that would automatically include the Universal Restore capability (provided you did install the Plus Pack first), use that to make an image of the VM, and then restore that image to the physical machine.  So this is what I decided to try.

When I started poking around the Acronis website in search of guidance on the details of the Universal Restore process, I came across a link to a search of the Acronis KnowledgeBase.  This turned up more than a thousand entries.  A quick scan of some of the first search results suggested that some of those entries existed because people had run into problems in the Universal Restore process.  It seemed I would need to brace myself for a somewhat finicky and potentially time-consuming effort.  I decided to go ahead with it, though.  Unlike the VMware V2P process, I knew that I had used Acronis many times in recent years, and I figured I would probably be using this procedure again, or something related to it.  So it would hopefully be a productive time investment.

The Universal Restore process was emphatically a restore process.  The instructions I planned to follow began with the assumption that I already had an Acronis image of the VM that I wanted to convert to a physical installation.  I thought, at first, that making an image of a virtual machine would be a matter of setting up VMware Workstation so that it would boot from the Acronis CD or USB drive (or, conceivably, from an ISO).  I had already worked through that setup process in another post.  So now I just had to insert my Acronis CD, boot the VM, and make the backup image on a Windows-compatible (e.g., NTFS) partition.  The VM booted, saw the CD, and Acronis started.  In my tweaked Windows installation, I had put the paging file on a separate virtual partition, so I didn't include that in the backup.

For the destination of my backup, unfortunately, I had a problem.  Within this virtual world, Acronis didn't see my "network" drives -- that is, the physical drives located within this same computer that VMware treated as though they were on a network.  I bailed out of the backup process and went into Acronis's Tools & Utilities > Add New Disk.  But that didn't provide a solution either.  My searches didn't lead to an answer.  A seemingly off-target post gave me the idea that maybe the solution was to install Acronis inside the VM and then try to do the backup there.  So I did that, and it worked.  I saved the system backup to a separate NTFS formatted drive, so that it would be visible to my Acronis CD.

I rebooted the system with the Acronis CD in the drive, and went into Acronis.  I selected Recover > My Disks > Browse and went to the image I wanted to restore.  I chose the Universal Restore option and, hoping that Acronis had already loaded itself into memory, I took out the Acronis CD and inserted my motherboard's driver installation CD.  Then I told Acronis to Add Search Path for the CD drive.  I told it to restore both drive C and the MBR and Track 0.  I designated the new partition where I wanted this to be restored to.  I named that same disk as the target for the MBR recovery.  I went ahead and the recovery process got underway.  After a while, I got an error message,

Device driver 'PCID\VEN_1002&DEV_4390&SUBSYS_B0021458&REV_00' for 'Microsoft Windows XP Professional' cannot be found.

So, oops, apparently Acronis was looking for the drivers that it did include on its own Universal Restore CD, not for the motherboard drivers.  It seemed that I should have left the Acronis CD in the drive for the time being.  The dialog did not give me a "retry" option, so it looked like this restoration might be toast.  I reinserted the Acronis CD, clicked Cancel, and started over.  But after I re-entered the target location and other options, it froze.  I punched the computer's reset button and re-restarted.  So then it went ahead and did the recovery.  But then it wound up at the same error message.  A search for that device driver name produced only four webpages, none in English, but a search for the vendor suggested that Acronis wanted the ATI driver, which I guessed meant the video driver.  So apparently it had not necessarily been a mistake to leave the motherboard's driver CD in the drive, first time around.

My hunch as to the nature of this problem was that simply pointing the installer to the CD drive was not specific enough; it was not going to search all of the subdirectories on the CD to find what it needed.  I put the motherboard CD back in the drive.  I decided, this time, to click the "Ignore" button on the dialog, so it would move on past this error and show me what came next.  Boom!  It immediately said, "Recover operation succeeded."  I wasn't sure it had needed or even looked at the motherboard CD at all.  I took out the CD, closed Acronis, and the system rebooted.  I turned off the power before it got itself fully back up again and disconnected the hard drive that contained my original dual-boot installation of Windows XP, so that now it would have to boot from the newly restored Windows XP partition or nothing.  And the answer was:  nothing.  I got "Error loading operating system."

I did a search and found that, for Patrink Zink, the solution was just to do a cold reboot.  Another thread emphasized connecting the new drive to the same SATA port as the previous program drive.  Another thread made me wonder whether it would have helped to create the target partition in Acronis rather than using GParted.  Yet another thread said something about drivers.  I figured that was the answer.  Apparently whatever I had done with the Acronis CD was a flop.  Just out of curiosity, I booted from the Windows XP installation CD and went into the Recovery Console.  I got there by pressing F8 a bunch of times before the "Error loading operating system" message could come up.  Normally, that would have put me into WinXP's Safe Mode, but apparently Safe Mode was not interested in helping me out.  In Recovery Console, I poked around enough to verify that something resembling a Windows operating system had indeed been installed on the drive.  I typed "chkdsk /r" and let that run.  Then I typed "fixboot" and then "fixmbr."  Then I tried rebooting from the hard drive.  No joy; still "error loading operating system."

I started over again with the Acronis CD.  Following the Acronis guide page, I looked for hard drive controller drivers or chipset drivers.  There was a GSATA folder in the BootDrv folder of the motherboard driver CD, so I designated that as the place for Acronis to look for what it wanted.  But Acronis said "No items to display" when I went to that folder, making me think that it was not finding the right drivers there.  I went into the Chipset folder on the CD, but same thing there.  After checking about 20 folders and finding that none of them had any items that the CD wished to display, I went back to the BootDrv\GSATA folder and designated that, and then proceeded with the recovery process.  It gave me the same error (above).  When it was done, I rebooted.  This time, instead of giving me an "Error loading operating system" message, the cursor just sat there after the "Boot from CD/DVD" line.

I gave it five or ten minutes and then shut the machine down.  I unplugged the new drive and reconnected the old one.  But then -- what's this?  It froze after "Boot from CD/DVD" even though the new drive wasn't connected!  I shut the machine down again, and this time I also disconnected the other hard drive, where I had stored the Acronis backup.  So now only the old Windows program drive was connected.  That worked:  I now got the GRUB2 menu, and the choice of going into Ubuntu or WinXP.  I tried starting the machine again, this time with only the new Windows program drive connected, using the same SATA cable as I had just used with the old drive.  But it was no use:  I got "Error loading operating system" again.

It occurred to me that this was a basic bootup problem, and for that purpose I could try the approach mentioned on another thread.  I had already installed WinXP on this computer, but only in a basic form; I was going to all this trouble because I didn't want to spend the time and effort to install all my Windows programs and configure them.  So far, that decision wasn't paying off.  But I thought perhaps I could copy the needed files from that existing basic Windows installation to my newly created Windows installation from the VM.  So I put the system back the way it was originally, without the new drive, and booted into Ubuntu.  I connected the new drive as an external USB drive and ran a file-comparison utility to see what was different between the files in the basic Windows XP installation and this new one.  (The utility I used was Beyond Compare.)  I really couldn't identify anything that I should be copying over from one to the other.

Collegedropout said that WinXP could have boot problems when the BIOS was set to recognize hard drives as "Auto."  The solution, s/he said, was to change it to "Large."  I tried that, and rebooted with only the new WinXP drive connected.  In my system's BIOS, this setting was located under Standard CMOS Features.  I had to hit Enter at each hard drive and then change Access Mode to Large.  This did not affect the problem, so I changed it back.

I was tempted to set up the Ubuntu dual-boot on the new drive and see if the Ubuntu bootloader would make any difference, but I decided there was probably no way around it:  I was going to have to figure out what they were talking about, when they referred to "chipset drivers."  I went into Device Manager to get the properties for the SATA hard drive controller (Start > Run > devmgmt.msc), but I didn't see it.  I did have the option of putting in a service request to Acronis, but at this ponit I decided I had invested enough time in this experiment.  I decided to just install WinXP manually on the new drive, and to see if I could return Acronis True Image Home 2011 and/or its Plus Pack for a refund.

Connecting Network Attached Storage (NAS) to a WinXP Guest in VMware: FAIL

I had two desktop computers running Ubuntu 10.04.  On one of them, I was running VMware Workstation 7.1, with Windows XP SP3 as a guest operating system in a virtual machine (VM).  I had just figured out how to network these two computers using Samba shares within a home network, where the two computers were connected via ethernet cables to a shared router.

Now there was a new question.  Could I add a Synology DS109 network-attached storage (NAS) device (essentially an external hard drive enclosure designed for network backup and file serving) to this network?  Of course I could, in the sense of running an ethernet cable from the Synology to the router; but what I was wondering was whether I could make this work despite the fact that the software for the Synology was available only for Windows and Mac, and not Linux.

It was a question, in other words, of whether I could run the Synology software in Windows XP in a guest VM.  I gave it a whirl.  I ran the Synology installation CD and went through the steps to set up the Synology Server.  This opened the Synology Assistant, a setup wizard; and after a moment, it gave me an error message:

No Synology Server was found on the local network.  Please make sure:

1.  Synology Assistant is not blocked by the firewall of your computer OS or anti-virus applications.

2.  Synology Server and your computer are both connected to the network.

3.  You have switched on the power of Synology Server.

Option 1 was the only one that seemed to explain the situation.  I decided to back up and make sure that I could see a shared folder on the other computer from within Windows.  In my first try, I set up that shared folder on an NTFS partition, and that led to a separate investigation of the difficulties of sharing an NTFS partition in Ubuntu.

That wound up taking longer than expected, so in the meantime I just focused on the link between the Synology and the computer in which I had VMware running.  I noticed that, in Ubuntu's Places > Network, it listed three items:  ANTEC (the name of this computer), Windows Network, and WINXP8 (the name of the computer running in the WinXP VM).  Plainly, Ubuntu was seeing Windows.  Was Windows seeing Ubuntu?  Or did it need to?  A first answer was that, of course, you could go into Windows Explorer > Tools > Map Network Drive and (assuming you had VM > Settings > Options tab > Shared Folders set up) you could gain access to NTFS and ext3 partitions outside of the drive C that existed inside the virtual machine.  These drives would be visible in Windows Explorer > My Network Places > Entire Network > VMware Shared Folders.

I tried running the Synology setup wizard again.  It gave me the same error as before.  I did a search and found webpages describing how to use NAS freeware to use another computer as an NAS device.  This raised two thoughts.  First, possibly I could use some software other than Synology's CD to make contact with the NAS device.  Second, perhaps I should consider using another computer myself, in lieu of the Synology unit.  I decided to go ahead with the Synology project for now; I could return or sell the device if it really wasn't what I wanted.  I probably could have assembled another computer at equal or lower cost, with far greater potential storage capacity, with more RAID options, with a more powerful processor (for e.g., checksum calculations) if needed, with what might prove to be more options in the choice of software packages and commands to manage and adjust it, and with more flexible hardware troubleshooting options (i.e., more than just fix it or replace it) in the event of malfunction.  Its drawbacks would include time and expense for software and hardware selection, learning, installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting; physical space requirements; power consumption; and noise and heat generation.

For the time being, I searched Synology's website and found a post raising the thought that perhaps a Windows connection was crucial only for the initial setup of the Synology device.  So I rebooted the computer into Windows XP instead of Ubuntu and ran the Synology setup CD from there.  This time, the wizard found the DiskStation right away.  So, really, I probably could have set the thing up using my laptop.  It seemed to be just a matter of connecting a Windows-based computer to configure the hard drive that I had inserted into the NAS unit.

Following the Quick Installation Guide, I looked for a Browse option in the Synology Assistant, but didn't see one.  Instead, in the Management tab of the Assistant, I double-clicked on the DiskStation entry, and that seemed to be the correct thing to do:  it opened a different Setup Wizard, or maybe a continuation of the same one.  The wizard said, "Please input the path of installation file."  Maybe this was where I was supposed to browse to the .pat file?  Sure enough. Browse brought up four different .pat files.  I chose the one for the 109 and opted for One-Click Setup.  It warned me that all data in the hard drive would be deleted.  I hoped it meant the hard drive that I had inserted into the NAS unit.  Lights began flashing on the unit.  It went through several steps:  Apply network settings, Format hard drive, Install DSM (DiskStation Manager) to hard drive, and Write configurations.  For my 2GB drive, the whole process took about 20 minutes.

When it was done, it said, "System has been installed successfully."  Then it just sat there.  Now what?  The other programs on the CD's Installation Menu were Data Replicator, in case I wanted to use the unit for backup rather than as a file server, and Download Redirector, for some purpose I didn't fully understand.  For lack of any better ideas, I rebooted into Ubuntu > Places > Network.  The list of places was the same as before.  I tried another search of the Synology website.  The product page for the DS109 definitely said that the unit was "designed for data storage and sharing among Windows, Mac, and Linux."  But how?

I knew I was desperate when I thought that perhaps I should consult the User's Guide.  But then -- what's this?  When I went to the downloads website, I saw that Synology Assistant was also available for Linux!  I had no idea.  I downloaded that and, while I was at it, also snagged what appeared to be a more recent DSM patch (.pat) file.  The User's Guide on the CD was for DSM 2.3, but the one online was for DSM 3.0, so I copied that too.  Apparently DSM was the firmware updater.  The included instructions were incorrect, as I eventually figured out.  All I had to do was to navigate to the folder where I had put the downloaded .tar.gz file ("cd /LOCAL/Synology") and the accompanying install.sh file, type "install.sh," designate /usr/local as the target directory, watch a bunch of error messages roll by, accept its offer to try again by sudo, copy and paste the command it offered to create a symbolic link, and then type "SynologyAssistant."

With that, Synology Assistant was up and running, and it found the DiskStation.  I double-clicked on it.  It opened a webpage in Firefox.  Having used the One-Click installation previously, I knew there was no administrator password, so I just clicked right on in.  Now I was looking at Management and Online Resources icons.  Management gave me all kinds of options.  I noticed I was in DiskStation Manager 2.3; did this mean that there was no DSM 3.0 for Linux?  On the left side, under System, I clicked on DSM Update.  Ah, of course.  This was the part where I got to Browse to the new .pat file I had downloaded.  It said, "Transferring data to the server.  Please wait."  This time, it was done in under 10 minutes.  It then confronted me with a signin screen.  I could not just click on through; it demanded that I enter something.  I tried Administrator without a password.  No go.  I tried my normal Ubuntu login.  Aha! . . . er, no.  That wasn't it either.  The hell.  I was locked out of my own NAS.  I wasn't alone.  Several other people had experienced this just within the last few days.  I suspected it was due to some quirk in newly released software.  I posted a "me too" note on it in Synology's moderated forum and waited.

But then -- reverting again, desperately, to the manual -- I noticed I was supposed to log in as "admin" with no password.  That worked, and now I was in DiskStation Manager 3.0.  I clicked on "Set up a volume and create a shared folder."  That opened Storage Manager.  I selected Storage > Create and that put me in Volume Creation Wizard.  The only option that wasn't greyed out was ISCSI LUN.  The manual didn't define that term, but Wikipedia said it was short for Internet SCSI, where SCSI is short for Small Computer System Interface.  The idea seemed to be that you were using the Internet instead of cables to create a SCSI setup.  LUN was short for "logical unit number."  An ISCSI LUN was apparently just any one of a set of drives in a SCSI array.  In other words, I was creating a logical drive.  So I went with that.

That gave me a choice of some more properties.  One was Thin Provisioning (default = yes), which was said to increase efficiency.  I was supposed to say how much of my 2TB (actually, 1829GB available, according to the dialog) I wanted to allocate to this first volume (default name:  LUN-1).  I was going to be backing up this file server to a 2TB drive, so I didn't worry about splitting the volume to a size that would match the external drive.  I thought it might be a good idea to have more than one volume, in case one went bad or needed maintenance.  The manual said that, on my unit, I could have up to ten.  I looked at my data and decided to go with three volumes of 600GB each.  (This would be changing later.)  Finally, there was an iSCSI Target Mapping option.  Again, the manual didn't explain this.  I found a website that sort of halfway did.  Eventually I just decided to go with the default, which was no, thank you.  I clicked Next > Apply and, in a few seconds, it was done.  I repeated for the other volumes -- or, I guess, LUNs, not volumes.  Then I clicked on the icons this process had created.  Each indicated that it had a 600GB capacity, but none of them actually seemed to have taken a bite out of the 1.8TB total.  Apparently that was how Thin Provisioning worked.  Then, to finish up with Storage Manager, I went to the HDD Management tab > Cache Management > Enable Write Cache.  I also ran a quick S.M.A.R.T. test.

This was all very nice, but I wasn't sure what it was actually accomplishing.  There weren't any new partitions appearing in Nautilus.  I wasn't sure if there were supposed to be.  I bailed out of Storage Manager.  I was looking again at Quick Start.  It said that now I needed to create a shared folder in the Synology.  I followed its link.  It put me into Control Panel - Shared Folder.  I clicked on Create.  In Create New Shared Folder, I set up a folder for LUNDATA, the first of my three LUNs.  It wouldn't let me select "Mount automatically on startup."  I gave both admin and guest read/write privileges for now.  I did the same with the other two LUNs.  I was confused, though:  after completing that step, I still didn't have anything to show for it.

It seemed that Chapter 7 of the User's Guide was where I wanted to be.  It told me to go to Main Menu (i.e., the down-arrow icon) > Control Panel > Win/Mac/NFS if I wanted to enable file sharing.  But that gave me an error:  "You are not authorized to use this service."  So, oops, that meant I had gotten logged out for dillydallying.  (First of many times!)  After re-login, the Quick Start reminded me that next on the list was "Create a User and assign privileges."  It had admin as the system default user already.  I selected that one and clicked edit.  Spooky thing here:  admin did have a password.  I wasn't sure why I didn't have to enter it when logging in.  I wasn't allowed to change the name of admin or disable that account.  I decided to change the password to something that I would actually know.  Admin already had full read/write privileges to my three LUNs.  The guest account was disabled.  I left it that way.  The manual (p. 66) said that each user could also have his/her/its own "home" folder.  It was something I had to enable if I wanted it.  I didn't need it, so I skipped that.

So now I went back to Win/Mac/NFS.  The User's Guide (p. 59) said that the unit supported file sharing in Linux in SMB, FTP, NFS, and WebDAV.  I unclicked the boxes so that the Synology would not offer Windows or Mac file service, which I did not need (and did not intend to provide to anyone else).  Instead, I clicked the Enable NFS box which, the manual (p. 61) said, was for Linux clients.  I figured that, in my Windows XP virtual machine, I would access the folders or LUNs on the Synology as network drives, just as if they had been ext3 drives inside the computer.

The remaining tab in this part of Control Panel had to do with Domain/Workgroup.  I didn't know if I wanted or needed to have the Synology be part of a domain, a workgroup, or both.  But then I found that the Domain/Workgroup tab was greyed out.  As I might have assumed, "workgroup" and "domain" appeared to be Microsoft-specific.  If I went back and enabled Windows file service, the Domain/Workgroup tab became ungreyed.  So that explained that:  it wasn't something I needed in Ubuntu.

In the Control Panel > Groups section of the Synology DSM, I saw that the default "users" group had read/write privileges only to the public folder, which I had disabled.  It was just me, so I didn't need a group.  So I left that all as it was.  Next, in Control Panel > Application Privileges, it appeared I could give users access to specific Synology applications (FTP, WebDAV, File Station, Audio Station, Download Station, or Surveillance Station).  Admin wasn't listed.  I assumed it didn't need to be.  I had no other users, so I skipped that part too.

Chapter 3 in the User's Guide, "Modify System Settings," told me that in Control Panel > Network, I could choose among several types of networks.  In my version of the Network dialog, those options were LAN, PPPoE, Wireless Network, and Tunnel.  The choice for my purposes seemed to be between LAN and PPPoE.  The manual said that I should use PPPoE if I used a cable or DSL modem and if my ISP used PPPoE.  I didn't know how to check that.  It didn't sound familiar, so I decided to start with LAN, the default (first) tab.  It gave me an option of manual or automatic configuration; I chose automatic (which was, again, the default).  That seemed to be about all I could do there.  While I was in the neighborhood, I went to Control Panel > Time and set it to synchronize itself with an NTP server.  

Now it was time to set up shared folders (User's Guide, p. 69).  In Control Panel > Shared Folder, I saw the three LUNs I had set up.  So apparently a LUN was a shared folder.  I had already taken care of this.  But that raised some questions.  If it was shared, what more did I need to do so that the computer would see it?  Should I have set up a "target" when I was creating the LUNs?  And did I want to encrypt them?

If I clicked on the Encrypt box, the "Mount automatically on startup" option became ungrayed.  I would want to enable that option.  But I had to think about that for a minute.  It seemed that encryption would protect the contents of the Synology in case of theft or loss of the physical device.  But apparently it would not protect those contents while the computer was turned on.  Anyone who could get into my computer, either physically or via the Internet, would have access to those contents.  I wasn't presently requiring myself to enter a login ID when I turned on the computer, so anyone sitting in my position would still have access, despite encryption.  I hadn't yet reviewed the part of the manual having to do with Internet access to the Synology, but evidently I would also have the option of logging in to it from elsewhere.  On the other hand, I had once had the experience of not being able to get into a backup that I had encrypted.  I wasn't sure if I had mis-recorded the password or if the encryption system on that backup had somehow gotten corrupted.  On balance, I decided that it would probably be a good idea to password the Internet-accessible data on the Synology, and to start requiring myself to enter a password to log in on the computer (System > Administration > Users and Groups).  But then, when I entered the password for the Synology and clicked OK, I got a warning telling me, "The performance of the encrypted shared folder will be decreased" and "The encrypted shared folder will not be available via NFS."  That would have defeated the purpose of having the Synology.  So I backed out of that.  No hard drive encryption in the Synology.

Well, the Synology was still not showing up in Nautilus.  I searched the manual for "target," in case that was the missing ingredient.  The User's Guide (p. 41) explained, "An iSCSI Target is like a connection interface . . . . [A]ll the LUNs mapped to the iSCSI Target are virtually attached to the client's operation [sic] system."  So apparently I would map my three LUNs to a target, and Ubuntu would see the target.  As the manual advised, I went into Synology's Storage Manager > iSCSI Target > Create.  There was an option to enable CHAP authentication, where the server would verify the client's identity.  I went with that.  I didn't go further and enable two-way authentication; I didn't need the computer to verify that it was contacting the right NAS unit.  I mapped all three LUNs to a single target.

In Edit > Advanced, I had an option to have it calculate CRC checksums for header and data digests.  The purpose would be to reduce or prevent data corruption.  The calculation would burden the CPU in the NAS, but I suspected the cabling would be more of a bottleneck than the processor nonetheless.  One post said that CRC might be a good idea for data traveling through a router, as would be the case here.  A year-old VMware webpage pertaining to a different VMware product (ESX) said that data digest for iSCSI was not supported on Windows VMs.  I decided to start out with these checksum items turned on, and see what the performance was like.  I also had options pertaining to maximum receive and send segment bytes.  The manual didn't seem to have anything on that, and nothing popped out in several different Google searches.  I decided to leave those at their default values of 262144 and 4096, respectively.

I still didn't see the Synology in Nautilus, but now (as I viewed p. 72 of the manual) I believed that was probably because I had not enabled my own username (ray) to have access.  In Synology's Control Panel > User, I added that username and gave myself full read/write access to the LUNs.  But then, whoa, on the next page, the User's Guide said that, to allow a Linux client to access a shared folder, I would have to go into Control Panel > Shared Folders > select the folder > NFS Privileges > Create and set up an NFS rule.  The first box there called for Hostname or IP.  It looked like the best way to identify the client would be by its IP address.  What was the IP address of my Ubuntu computer?  Zetsumei said I should type "/sbin/ifconfig" in Terminal.  I did that and got a bunch of information regarding eth0, lo, vmnet1, and vmnet8.  Same thing if I just typed "ifconfig -a."  A search didn't shed any light.  The number for eth0 came first and looked most familiar, so I tried that, with no mapping and asynchronous enabled.  This still didn't produce anything in Nautilus, so I thought probably I should have mapped.  But to what?  The only options were "Map to admin" or "Map to guest."  How about "Map to ray"?

A search of the Synology website led to a thread that yielded more questions than answers.  For the first time, the thought crossed my mind that the quality of the Synology organization was possibly not as gold-plated as I had hoped or imagined.  Surely the manual could have been clearer; surely, at these prices, the people posting these questions deserved some enlightenment.  At any rate, links in that thread led to one of those multiyear Ubuntu discussions, this one dealing particularly with NFS.  It seemed I should focus on learning about NFS; among other things, some posters felt that it was far better than Samba for sharing files and folders.

So I did a search and found a recent webpage promising to show me how to set up NFS.  I guessed that the real problem might be on the client side, so I started with that part of the webpage.  First off, they wanted me to install some packages:  portmap, nfs-common, and autofs.  A check of Synaptic told me that Synology had not installed these.  After installing them, I looked in the manual for the Synology IP address.  On page 161 (after many references to the IP address), the manual said that I could find it in Main Menu > System Information -- not, that is, in Control Panel.  The IP address it gave was, however, the same as the default entry it showed in Control Panel > Network > Use manual configuration; it was not the number shown in the DNS Server box.  So in the client, following the instructions on that webpage about NFS, I typed "sudo gedit /etc/hosts.deny" and added a line that said "portmap : ALL."  Then I typed "sudo gedit /etc/hosts.allow" and added a line that said "portmap : [Synology IP address]," using the address I had just found in Main Menu > System Information.  Next, I typed "sudo gedit /etc/hosts" and added a line near the top that said "[Synology IP address] [Synology Server Name]," in the same format as the other lines there.  (The server name was shown in Main Menu > System Information.)

Continuing with the NFS webpage's instructions, I was supposed to type something along the lines of "sudo mount [Synology Folder] [Local Folder]."  For that purpose, I understood that Synology Folder = [Synology IP address]:[Synology Shared Folder].  But I was not sure what the Shared Folder part was supposed to be.  Was I supposed to refer to the LUN or the iSCSI Target on the Synology unit?  Since the User's Guide (p. 41) said that an iSCSI Target was "like a connection interface," and that all the LUNs attached to it would be attached to the operating system, it seemed that I would need only one target, as I had set it up.  But now that I had learned more about security on the Synology, I had changed my mind about the number of shared folders I wanted.  I just wanted two, each 900GB in size:  one to contain stuff that shouldn't be changing very often, and that only the administrator should have write privileges for, and one for everything else, i.e., for the stuff that I would want to be able to mess with on a daily basis.  So after changing the LUNs and target in Storage Manager, I guessed that I would be creating two folders using the pattern of "/home/[username]/[foldername]" (where "username" would be "ray" in my case) -- one for each of the two LUNs on the Synology.  One of them was called SYNDATA.  On that basis, I typed "sudo mount [Synology IP address]:[Synology 900GB folder name] /home/ray/SYNDATA."  This gave me "access denied by server while mounting [Synology Folder]."  Not a desirable answer, but at least it was a reply of some kind!

By now, I was completely confused, and more than a little irritated at how very long this was taking.  The NAS was supposed to be simplifying my situation, not making it more complex.

It did seem, at this point, that it might have been easier to troubleshoot this if I had been using a computer as my NAS:  I could have gone into it and typed various commands to maybe get a bit more insight on what was happening in there.  A search for that error message led to the suggestion that I type "/usr/sbin/rpcinfo -p" to see what ports the server was using, but that gave me a "No such file or directory" error.

I decided to put in a support request at Synology.  The form required me to enter the Firmware Version -- but, of course, this was not provided in the System Information dialog.  I just entered something that seemed approximately right.  It also asked for the serial number -- and that, they helpfully indicated, was located on the bottom or perhaps the rear of the unit.  After turning it around and risking unplugging it, doing gymnastics to hold it while typing, I realized that, well, they might have mentioned that that bit of information actually *was* in the System Information dialog.  But when I got down to the part where they were ready and listening to what I had to say, I was not sure what to type.  There wasn't an option of talking to (or even chatting with) a live person.  I had to type something.  But what?  How could I possibly explain all this in a few words?

What I needed, somewhere in the Synology software, was a tool that would tell me what was happening.  "You have connected to a computer" or "You have not connected to a computer," etc.  I wasn't sure -- I hadn't done much networking before -- but I suspected that I could get that kind of information by using regular Linux commands on a computer in a network.

I decided that what I would tell the Synology people was just that they should look at this post.  I had identified a number of areas they could improve; and if they really got on the stick, they might even be able to respond in time to help me, before I returned the unit to the vendor or resold it.  The unit had more than a dozen positive remarks from other purchasers at Newegg, so I was hopeful.  But meanwhile, I started a post on the alternative of using a separate computer to create my own NAS.

Installing Windows XP SP3 in VMware Workstation 7.1 on Ubuntu 10.04

I had decided to stay with VMware Workstation 7.1 for a while longer, adopting a wait-and-see strategy toward VirtualBox and whatever other virtualization developments might be underway.  A couple of years had passed since I had first installed Windows XP on VMware Workstation in Ubuntu.  My old virtual machines (VMs) were creaking and malfunctioning.  It was time to create a new WinXP VM.

I had obtained mixed results from efforts to use VMware Converter to build VMs from existing WinXP installations or other sources.  I decided to build a fresh installation, installing XP within a newly created VM.  I had already installed VMware Workstation.  Now I started it as root user by typing "sudo vmware," and then I went into Ubuntu's Applications > Accessories > Terminal.  In Workstation, I went into Edit > Preferences and adjusted the settings that would apply to all VMs, some of which could only be set by root.  In the Preferences > Workspace tab, I went with the default settings for the most part.  For the default location of my VMs, I chose a partition on a separate hard drive for better performance.  In the Display tab, I selected the three Autofit options.  I selected all of the Updates options.  In the Memory tab, I left about 1.5GB of RAM for the system; the rest was for VMs.

When I was done with the settings, I killed that session and restarted VMware as a normal user.  I created a new VM with these characteristics:

• I started with a 40GB independent, persistent SCSI VM, but ran into some problems when I tried to shrink it, and ultimately had to start over.  Since it was easier to grow a VM than to shrink it, I decided on 20GB to start.  Although I initially created this as a preallocated space, it seemed that clones (which I made from time to time as backup, as the installation and tweaking process went along) would default to being non-preallocated, and I decided that was actually better until things got settled, because non-preallocated drives were smaller and therefore easier to clone and to back up.
• A 4GB independent, persistent IDE virtual drive, within this VM, for the paging file (VM > Settings > Hardware > Add).  This, I discovered, was best created after WinXP was installed.  Otherwise, WinXP was quite capable of brainlessly installing itself into this little partition and leaving the 20GB partition unused, thereby providing yet another reason to start over from the beginning.  Also, this drive was best created when the VM was powered down; only a SCSI (not preferred) drive could be created while the machine was powered up.  Note also that, as soon as you start down this path, Workstation may create a miniature version of a file for such a hard drive, even if you then abort the process -- in which case your later attempts to create that file may trigger strange results, until you investigate and delete any such runt file.
• 1.5GB RAM.  I had opted for 32-bit Ubuntu and WinXP after numerous previous hassles with 64-bit systems.  The discovery of PAE-enabled kernels meant I could go above the ordinary 32-bit limit of 4GB of RAM, so I was comfortable with this 1.5GB allocation for a single VM.  I could have gone higher, but I had almost never reached the point of using even this much.
• One single-core CPU.
• Based on my own usage, I set "Don't automatically connect" for floppy, USB devices,  or printer.
• Power:  enter full screen mode after powering on; close after powering off.
• Shared folders:  always enabled, map as network drive, make read/write only those that needed to be written to in Windows.
• No AutoProtect.
• Guest isolation:  enable drag and drop; enable copy and paste; don't enable VMCI.
• VMware Tools Updates:  use application default (currently update automatically).

Then I inserted the Windows XP CD and installed Windows XP, using a slipstreamed CD with Service Pack 3 (SP3) on it.  In my first attempt at this, I had to deal with the problem of making the VM boot from the CD.  I had just learned how to do this.  First, in Ubuntu's Terminal, I typed "sudo gedit [path][filename].vmx," for the .vmx file pertaining to this VM, and then I went to the end of that file and added bios.bootDelay = "10000" and saved the edited file.  This gave me a ten-second delay on VMware's splash screen.  So then I had time, on reboot, to read the options and choose F2 for BIOS setup.  In BIOS setup, I chose Boot, moved the CD-ROM drive up to be first in the boot sequence, and then hit F10 to save and close.  Then I installed WinXP.  The process was completely automatic, this time; apparently the latest version of VMware Workstation was able to detect my settings from the underlying Ubuntu installation.

Once WinXP was done with its basic installation process, I right-clicked on the VMware Tools icon in the system tray (i.e., the lower-right-hand corner of the WinXP desktop), chose "Open VMware Tools," and selected all three items in the Options tab, and then closed that.  To get the Windows desktop to stretch all the way across the monitor, I used VMware's View > Stretch Guest (using the menu at the top of the screen), and then returned it to View > Autofit Guest, and for some reason that did it.  I had to map my network drives after listing them in Workstation's VM > Settings > Options > Shared Folders.  Then I turned to the process of tweaking my WinXP installation.  There are some additional VM-related notes in my post on that.  When I tried to open a PDF file from within the VM, I got a Default Host Application error message.  Another post discusses that problem.

I wanted to use Acronis TrueImage to make periodic images throughout the installation process, so as to capture each working state of the system in a single snapshot.  On a standalone WinXP installation, that would have been just a matter of inserting the Acronis CD and making the backup to a separate partition.  In the VM context, though, Acronis was only willing to recognize only those partitions that were defined as part of the VM.  What I did instead, then, was to power down the VM, use Nautilus to copy the entire VM's folder to an NTFS drive, boot Acronis, and make an image of that VM folder.  (I also made a .zip of it in 7zip, just in case.)

To get the system to pause before loading Windows within VMware, so that I would have time to make a decision to adjust the BIOS or choose boot devices, I edited the individual virtual machine as described in a previous post.  Basically, I set Workstation's VM > Settings > Hardware tab > CD/DVD > "Connect at power on" and "Use a physical device" (though I was intrigued by the "Use ISO image" option).  In Terminal, I typed "sudo gedit [path][filename].vmx," for the .vmx file pertaining to this VM; and at the end of that file I added a line that said this:

    bios.bootDelay = "10000"

and that bought me ten seconds instead of one or two, when that vmware logo came up.

*** NOTE ***

At this point, I stopped developing this post.  Several other system issues had to be taken care of first, and those were superseded by non-system tasks.  When I returned to this post several months later, my purpose was just to close it down.  I had decided, by that time, to stop working on VMware within Ubuntu.  The following fragments are the other notes I had left over, in incomplete form, when I ceased working on this post.

Fragmentary notes continue as follows:

*  *  *  *  *


At some point in the process, I started getting an error message when I was trying to shut down the WinXP VM:

End Program - VMwareUser.exe
This program is not responding.

I did a search and found that virtually nobody was having this problem.  That was not a good sign.  A different search suggested that lots of people were having problems of one sort or another with VMwareUser.exe.  That was not a good sign either.  I didn't have an answer for this problem at this time.

After adding another program, Windows Explorer began flashing, refreshing itself every couple of seconds, in what appeared to be a different network drive problem.  I have written up the process of solving that in a separate post.

After tweaking the WinXP installation, I began adding programs.  I installed Copernic Desktop Search as one of those programs.  VMware Workstation treated my data drives as network drives, and Copernic regarded network drives as a sign that I was in a workplace, so I could not use their free version with VMware.  I downloaded their professional version ($40 to buy) and used it on a trial basis.  It was not able to save its index to a network drive.  Its index, I heard somewhere, would be about 10% of the total size of the files being indexed.  So if I had 100GB worth of files, I would have a 10GB index.  I definitely did not want that kind of monster sitting on my drive C.  But there seemed to be no alternative.  I decided to add a third virtual hard drive (30GB max, not preallocated) to the VM, made it drive Q, and told Copernic to save its index there.  When Copernic was done with its indexing, that drive

The only tweak that didn't seem to work was the one where I went into Internet Explorer and tried to save its Temporary Internet Files folder to some drive other than C.  It wouldn't save to a network drive.  But it also wouldn't even save to the little drive that I had created to serve as a paging file.  Possibly there wasn't enough disk space available for it there.

In the interests of improving performance, I worked through a VMware document on that subject.