Hyper-V and floppy disks

Using floppy disks on Hyper-V virtual machines

The problem

Hyper-V is great, but Microsoft have removed support for floppy disks. That's fine for most of the time, but what about when you need to read a dusty old floppy disk ...

A while ago I developed some software that was ported to various UNIX platforms. I moved code and compiled binaries around on floppy disks and recently had the need to read one of these. So I fired up my Red Hat Linux VM and found that unfortunately I couldn't add my physical (USB attached) floppy drive to the VM.

You can however attach a virtual floppy disk via a floppy drive image file. So the problem became how to read my physical floppy drive to an image, ahead of mounting it in my Red Hat environment.

The solution

You will need a physical floppy drive for this. I picked up a USB drive on eBay for a few quid.

Read the floppy drive image from the physical media to an image file

1. Download a program called "dd" from here. (This is a Windows version of a UNIX command that can stream physical media, such as a floppy disk, to a file on your hard drive.
2. Open a command prompt and run the command to read the floppy drive to a file:

                      dd if=\\.\a: of=floppyimage.vfd bs=1440k

You will now have a file "floppyimage.vfd" that is a copy of all of the contents of the floppy drive. You are now finished with the physical floppy drive, so you can unplug it and put it away safely, so you can find it in 5 years time when you need it again.

Attach the floppy image file to your virtual machine

1. Open up the settings for your Hyper-V virtual machine
2. In the "Hardware" section on the left, find the "Diskette Drive" and using the Floppy Drive settings, browse to the virtual floppy (.vfd) file you just created above.
3. Now the operating system will be able to read the floppy (image) as if the floppy disk itself was inserted into a drive on the machine. In my case I could read the drive on Red Hat via the /dev/fd0 device. On a Windows virtual machine you should see an A:\ drive

Lenovo X60 maximum memory

Just a quick post to document that a Lenovo x60 will take 4GB of RAM. This is contrary to the Lenovo website and memory suppliers such as Crucial who will be basing their data off the Lenovo statement.

I just installed 2 x 2GB DIMMS in my trusty x60 - no problems.

AB

BU-303 GPS on Windows 7

Quick post on how to get the BU-303 working with Windows 7.

First up the BU-303 mini CD that comes with the unit wont work. My guess is that there is some Operating System check going on and it doesnt understand post Windows XP.

So you need to get hold of the driver files and manually install the device.

1. Visit http://www.globalsat.com.tw/products-page.php?menu=2&gs_en_product_id=2&gs_en_product_cnt_id=34&img_id=420&product_cnt_folder=4 and download the file "BU-303_CD.zip" by clicking on the English link.



2. Extract the zip file and make sure you keep the path names. You should end up with a "BU-303 CD" folder.



3. Plug in the BU-303 if you havent already done so and open up device manager.



4. Locate the BU-303 wich with be shown as an unknown USB device



5. Right click on the unknown device and select the option to browse for a folder containing the drivers, locate the "BU-303 CD" folder and click OK



6. The driver will be found, but you will see a red warning dialog which is displayed because the driver isn't signed, select the option to allow the driver to be installed and you should be good to go. The USB device will vanish and a new serial (COM) device will appear - see image above.

Note that if you install the "GPS Information" application using the "GPSInfo.exe" installer from the "BU-303 CD" folder, you will need to run it by right clicking and select "Run as Administrator".

I expect that the instructions will also work for getting the BU-303 working on Vista but this has not been tested.

Windows Vista environmental impact

Just loaded Windows 7 on my laptop & I reacon I get an extra 30% life out of my battery than when it was running Vista. This means I approximately only have to charge it twice for every three times I was charging it when running Vista!
Got to thinking about the environmental impact of Vista and its power hungry behaviour on all the PCs in the World - Microsoft should make sure it thinks about this every time it refreshes its software and take responsibility.

Windows 7 system recovery

Having successfully upgrading my laptop to run Windows 7 I was in the process of installing my applications when unfortunately towards the end of the list I installed something that broke my installation resulting in a blue screen of death every time I boot the system.

I restarted my machine and gratefully accepted Windows offer to attempt to fix my machine. After much whirring Windows 7 restarted and hey presto I could log in again - fantastic!

Actually not quite so fantastic as I had hoped, as it turned out that the recovery process had uninstalled the majority of the applications I had previously installed successfully.

This included Office 2007 which I had activated. When I tried to reactivate having reinstalled I was told that I needed to ring Microsoft as I had exceeded my number of activations - hmmm, not such a smart recovery process.

My advice would be not to activate anything after a Windows 7 install, until you are happy that everything is loaded and working ok.

Wonder if creating numerous restore points would have helped ...

AB

Installing Windows 7 RTM on a Sony Vaio VGN FW

This post provides a record of what steps I had to go through in order to get Windows 7 Ultimate running successfully on a Sony Vaio VGN-FW21E. I imagine it would be a similar experience for all the models found in the VGN range.



When I bought the Sony, Vista Home came preinstalled, and while the machine has been relatively stable I was underwhelmed by general performance and battery life. It has a P8400 processor and 4GB RAM so I was working on the basis that the hardware was not to blame and that Windows 7 should improve the user experience.



Step #1 : Create a Sony recovery DVD set (2DVDs)

You never know what will happen when you have reformatted your hard drive, so it's good to have this safety net. Unfortunately Sony provide all the hardware drivers and applications in a .MOD format, which means that us mere mortals will effectively be starting from scratch when the base Operating System is changed.



Step #2 : Buy a new hard drive (optional)

I took the view that hard drives are cheap and that I wanted all of my data (photos, music, source code etc.) safely out of the way while I rebuilt my machine. After some research I bought a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB for around £65. It's a 5400RPM drive (same as the old drive), but runs silent and also at a lower wattage so that helps the battery out. Installing the hard drive was a relatively simple procedure, no jumper changes on the drive were required.



Step #3 : Slot in the Windows 7 DVD and install the operating system

This is a pretty slick process now. Microsoft have done a good job of hardware detection and driver support. The process took around 30 minutes.



Step #4 : Sort out the hardware anomolies

There are 2 pieces of hardware that are not correctly installed by the Windows 7 installation:

1. A Ricoh SD card driver - this was resolved by connecting the Vaio to the Internet and letting Windows Update take care of it.


2. The Sony Firmware Extension Parser driver - this is not handled by Windows Update and a driver had to be downloaded from Sony. Visit http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computing/vaio/downloads/preinstalled/index.aspx?l=en_GB&m=VGN-FW21E and click on the "Previously installed" tab. Select the "SFEP Driver" and extract the zip file to a temporary folder. Then open the Windows 7 Device Manager and locate the "Unknown device". Right mouse click and select "Update driver" then use the "Browse my computer" option to locate the temporary folder containing the extracted zip file. Click "Next" and let Windows 7 install the new driver.

Step #5 : Sort out the Softkeys (Alt+Blue key) and media controls (silver play, pause etc).

This was the hard bit. Sony don't make it easy for you to find the necessary installers to get these going.

The Sony website where you can find the necessary downloads is: http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computing/vaio/downloads/preinstalled/index.aspx?l=en_GB&m=VGN-FW21E

This will vary if you dont have a VGN-FW21E, so you should start at http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computing/vaio/index.aspx?l=en_GB or http://support.vaio.sony.eu/computing/vaio/flash/hub_cons.html if you want to specify your country.

After a significant amount of research (see references) and ranting I downloaded and installed the following in the same order as shown below.

1. Sony Shared Library [5.1 _ 5.1.00.07110] (Originally installed tab)
2. VAIO Event Service [4.1 _083Q_ 4.1.00.07150] (Originally installed tab)
3. Setting Utility Series [4.1_083Q_4.1.00.08130] (Updates tab)
4. VAIO Control Center 3.1 [083Q_ 3.1.00.07110] (Updates tab)
5. VAIO Power Management [3.1 _ 3.1.00.08060] (Originally installed tab)

Step #6 : Update the Realtek audio and ATI video drivers

This was not strictly necessary, but I wanted to have some of the associated hardware applications for the audio & video such as the Catalyst control center. I looked at downloading directly from ATI but their distrbution did not seem to work, so I fell back on the Sony support site. The packages were downloaded and installed as shown:

1. Audio Driver (Realtek) [6.0T_F_32_6.0.1.5653-0702] (Originally installed tab)
2. Audio Driver Realtek HDMI [6.0B_32_6.0.1.5612_logo] (Originally installed tab)
3. Graphics Driver ATI_Doraemon2 [8.513.1.0] (Originally installed tab)

Step #7 : Sit back and enjoy Windows 7.

Performance improvement is siginificant over Vista, my battery gives me about an extra 30% life and hard drive activity light is greatly reduced. This is what Vista should have been.

AB

References : VAIO FW Clean Windows 7 Install Guide, http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=355715