Saturday, December 26, 2009

Moving the default home folder of VBox

How to move the default home folder of VBox program?

On windows, by default VBox creates installation folder in Program Files and its configuration and data folder in C:\Documents and Settings\\.VirtualBox.

.VirtualBox will contain:

1- VirtualBox.xml: VBox configuration file.

2- Machines: A folder that stores Virtual machines files.

3- HardDisks: A folder that stores Virtual machines hard disks files.



The are several problems with this setting:

1- HardDisks and Machine folders will have a size for several GB. This will slow your system, because:

a- It will slow down virus check, disk fragmentation and check disk operations.

b- If you have back up or image tool such as Norton Ghost or CloneZiller, it will make your hard disk image unnecessary large, and back up and restore operations will take a long time.

2- If anything goes wrong with your system drive (C:) that forces you to reinstall Windows, all your Vbox work will be gone.

Solution:
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Move it to another partition or hard disk and add a new user variable to Windows Environment Variables. This is indirectly mentioned in the User manual of the VBox pdf file. To find it search for the following text (VBOX_USER_HOME).

Adding new new user variable can be done by right click on My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Environment Variables and add VBOX_USER_HOME to the user environment variables. The value will be: \.VirtualBox\

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