Re: [gentoo-user] Windows 10 Pro 64bit in Virtualbox

[Michael <confabulate@kintzios.com>]

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> On Sat, May 22, 2021, 17:02 <thelma@sys-concept.com> wrote:
> > Is anybody running Windows 10 Pro 64bit in Virtualbox?
> > Is it stable?
> > Is it easy to resize?

I forgot to mention stability and resizing ...

In one case after a major update the Win10 desktop became terribly unstable, 
menus not showing up, everything on the desktop taking minutes to respond to a 
mouse click or keyboard press.  Eventually I realised the transparency had 
been enabled by the update and this was cause any desktop graphics to render 
partially and with a lot of latency.  Disabling transparency restored the 
previous normal desktop behaviour.  This was on a host with an old AMD-Radeon 
APU.  Other video cards and drivers may not have such a problem, but I thought 
it worth mentioning.

Resizing the C:\ drive partition is straight forward, in most cases.  You can 
use 'VBoxManage modifyhd' in a terminal to increase the virtual disk size, or 
the VBox GUI Virtual Media Manager tab.  Then use the Windows Disk Management, 
or boot the VM with GParted and resize the OS partition & filesystem.  
However, Windows 10 tends to create additional partitions as part of 
installation, or subsequent major updates.  These are called System Reserve 
Partitions (SRP).  Initially one is created at the start of the disk to 
contain bitlocker, boot and Windows Restore data.  After certain major 
updates, or if the Windows 10 installation was an in situ upgrade from an 
older Windows 7 installation, such an SRP can be placed after the C:\ drive.  
In one case, changing an installed system from MBR to GPT/UEFI also created an 
ESP after the C:\ drive.  It follows you won't be able to increase the size of 
the C:\ partition without moving any partitions following it out of the way 
first, increasing C:\, then restoring the moved partitions.  Since an 
otherwise 5 minute disk & partition resizing exercise can develop into a 
prolonged and pre-planned effort, you'd be better off sizing up the virtual 
disk before you start installing MSWindows.

Big upgrade releases every six months may require more temporary storage space 
to create a backup in case the upgrade fails.  If enough space is not 
available on the disk, the the OS will ask you to insert a USB drive to be 
used during the upgrade.  You can also create and attach a new virtual disk 
for this purpose.

Finally, there's the Windows 10 'Storage Spaces' replacing Dynamic Disks, if 
you want to create a RAID in software.  I understand you use it to add more 
disks/partitions, like you would with a RAID, but I have never used this to 
know what it can achieve in terms of resizing.  

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