art's abode

This morning my work laptop died a horrible and painful death. Suffice it to say that burning smell was not the smell of bacon on the pan but rather my poor work laptop melting internally.

Luckily, I was able to pull out the hard drive and plug it in elsewhere to ensure that I hadn’t lost any hard drive data. What little fortune I had today was in discovering that the hard disk itself was fine.

This left me with a dead computer, a good hard drive, and no way to run the drive.

Enter P2V. Using WinImage or any other tool that can convert a drive into a .VHD file, I managed to create an image of my notebook’s drive into a standard VHD.

At this point you may have read about HAL issues when using the VHD, blue screens and other horrific stuff. I was able to ignore all of these issues simply by creating a virtual machine in VirtualBox (not VMWare, Virtual Server or Hyper-V). VirtualBox now supports VHDs, so it’s simply a matter of creating a new VM, and using your VHD as an existing drive.

I was able to boot up without problems, and Windows 7 in the VM automatically downloaded all the new drivers I needed (such as the VM audio card, network card, etc.). Installing virtual additions also works. It doesn’t get any easier than that!

Look ma, two OSes, one Desktop (and I ain’t talking Cygwin cheese either…):

Yes yes… I know you’re scared… let the VM frenzy begin!

Having had problems with my ISP’s modem/router/firewall/wireless device, I wanted to bridge to a separate device to handle the routing, firewall and wireless.

I have been using a Linksys WRT54G version 1 for this task. The firmware had to be flashed with DD-WRT, which is a pretty good firmware all in all, but seemed to be stretching the limits of the version 1 WRT54G.

The vintage DD-WRT build, which is the appropriate flavour for the WRT54Gv1 is a stripped-down version of DD-WRT which doesn’t contain some of the newer features. Although it was fairly stable, it got slow and unresponsive at times over wireless, and had some trouble maintaining long-term RDP sessions over wireless, dropping the connections maybe twice an hour for a minute or so each time. Although QoS may have been an issue, my clever rebuttal is that “it doesn’t work for me out of the box”: I’m lazy as fuck, what do you expect?

All in all, DD-WRT worked better than the Speedtouch 780 as a router, and better than the stock Linksys or OpenWRT firmwares. My main problem with DD-WRT was that for some black magic voodoo reason, the XBox 360 was unable to join the wireless network. It could detect it, discover encryption method, but was unable to connect to the network no matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I cried into my pillow.

After acquiring some expert/professional advice (i.e., googling the interwebs), I installed tomato the other day, and lo and behold—the XBox was able to connect without problems. Tomato seems more responsive than the DD-WRT thus far, which is another bonus.

I’m not sure about the newer WRT54G models, but if you have a version 1, you may want to consider using tomato rather than the stock Linksys, DD-WRT or OpenWRT firmwares.