[vbox-dev] vditool little patch

Klaus Espenlaub espenlaub at innotek.de
Thu Jul 5 15:27:44 GMT 2007


JusTiCe8 schrieb:
> Hi,
> 
> this is a patch for vditool util which:
> 
> - allow case insensitive string compaisons, more user-friendly from my 
> own point of view,

This has been already fixed about two months ago. In a more portable 
way, as the Windows C library hasn't heard of strcasecmp. I think on the 
same day you checked out the sources.

> - add a SETGEO command to set vdi geometry and allow to shrink or, which 
> is very often asked on forum, grow a vdi.

Sorry, but I have to correct this a little. In the first place this 
doesn't allow you to grow a VDI. The guest may think it's bigger, but if 
you actually want to use the extra space you'll get I/O errors. Resizing 
requires more of the VDI to be changed. Like growing the chunk table.

And the shrinking part also is not quite correct, as the excess data is 
not discarded, which could be irrelevant depending on the circumstances.

All this can do is a bit of geometry hacking, which is sometimes useful, 
agreed. But then to make this really useful changing the BIOS 
translation setting is missing.

Please don't get me wrong, we really appreciate patches. But if 
growing/shrinking were that simple we'd have implemented it long ago.

-- 
Dr. Klaus Espenlaub     innotek GmbH, http://www.innotek.de




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