Tag Archives: Windows

VirtualBox and Windows driver verifier

I was troubleshooting some Windows hangs on my Desktop system running Windows 8 and enabled driver verifier. Today when I tried to start VirtualBox it failed with this error message.

Failed to load VMMR0.r0 (VERR_LDR_MISMATCH_NATIVE)

Most of the online forums were asking to reinstall VirtualBox to fix the issue. But one of the thread mentioned that it was being caused by Windows Driver Verifier. I disabled it, restarted Windows and VirtualBox worked like a charm. Didn’t have time to do more research as i quickly wanted to test something. May be we can skip some particular stuff from Driver Verifier and VirutalBox can then work.

Manually booting an OS from GRUB

One of my friend today asked me about removing Linux partitions & GRUB (from a dual boot system) and return back to windows alone. Removing Linux involves just formatting/removing the partitions. Now to remove GRUB either do fdisk /mbr from a Windows 98 bootable CD or do fixmbr after booting into repair mode with Windows XP CD. But if you have none then to remove GRUB you will need some utility like this one and if you reboot before doing that it might make GRUB unable to boot into Windows. It will get stuck at GRUB> prompt only. So there is an option: to manually boot the OS you want (ie Windows). A quick search gave link to this thread. It involves few commands on the GRUB prompt:

grub> rootnoverify (hd0,0)
grub> makeactive
grub> chainloader +1
grub> boot

It will load the NTLDR where your Windows is installed in Partition 1 on HDD 1.

Unxutils for Windows

If you are used to work in Unix enviroment and then sometime, in between have to sit on Windows and tail -f alert_DB.log, its a real pain. There is a small bundle of utilities, called Unxutils which can make you feel at home in Windows too. These are the exe’s of all major commands in Unix like more, less, ls, grep etc…
To use it just download the zip file from the link above, extract it to some folder and add the path of exe’s to your Windows PATH. Restart your machine and you are done.
Happy more’ing…less’ing…

Get rid of your copy paste woes in Windows

I was copying some data from a DVD and it stopped in between due to some error with some file. Then I was reminded of Total Copy (A small alternate utility to Windows copy) but even thats is not much stable and you have to right click & drag for copy/paste.

I googled a bit and came across another small utility called Tera Copy. Its just 1 MB download and replaces Windows copy/paste. It provides many options like skipping a file, resuming copy and some other stuff. A must have for all Windows users. There is a pro version too.