John's Blog

This is sort of a well known trick but I'll post it anyway.  The problem is you install Virtualbox (My Host: Fedora 18 x86_64, My Guest: Windows 7) and the guest screen resolution is somewhat limited. Maybe it's 1024x768 or something like that and you can't get the full screen capabilities of your host device. The solution - install Guest Additions on your guest OS (Menu | Devices | Install Guest Additions ..) and then auto resize guest display (Menu | View | Auto Resize Guest Display). Now everytime you resize the window in the host the video driver in the guest will "see" a different monitor it can display on and adjust its options accordingly. You can see this in action by right-clicking on the guest OS and selecting "Screen Resolution" and then watching the choices change as you resize the Vbox window on the host. http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-resize-window

I recently installed Windows 7 on VirtualBox 4.1.8 for Fedora Core 16. I had previously installed Windows XP on same system without any problems. However, while trying to install Windows 7 I got the following error early in the process: “A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now. Note: If the Windows installation media is in the CD/DVD drive, you can safely remove it for this step.” Note that this is a generic sort of error. Some people have reported this same error when the Windows 7 install media is an ISO file that is corrupted, perhaps due to a truncated download. However, since I was installing from a factory DVD this was obviously not the case for me. It turned out that the way around this error was to enable the "Passthrough" option in VirtualBox Guest Machine Settings (under "Storage") specifically to enable the DVD drive to be "Passthrough".  Once t...