virtualbox.org

Hi All,

Has anyone here had any experience with virtualbox with an encrypted hard drive (cryptsetup, dmcrypt)?

I am using cryptsetup to encrypt my /home partition.
Whenever I try to install an operating system, it just hangs, and the disk drive goes nuts. I can hear it clicking and buzzing like crazy. (not the bad clicking. It just sounds busy.

I am unsure if encryption should slow it to a halt. I know it impacts performance a little bit, and alot for disk intensive operations, but when I put in my windows guest cd to install... it doesn't even get past the windows loading screen to get into the setup. Is this normal?

Does anything else impact this? Does LVM have an effect?

Could it be anything else? Im not even sure if it is the encryption thats making it not work, but it seems the most likely.

Thanks and Regards,

Mike

I have just removed the encrypted partition and tried to install it and the same thing happens. So it's not the encryption thats doing it...

what else could it be?

Found out that it was not infact cryptsetup or lvm.
I only had the 486 kernel version installed (limiting to 1gb RAM).
I set virtualbox up with 1gb ram, so it was spilling to swap and therefore having heavy impact on the disk.

If anyone wants to know if cryptsetup and lvm works fine with virtualbox....

First hand experience is that is works really well. Fast and not even noticable that you're using encryption. Highly recommended.

Just make sure you assign appropriate memory to your virtual machine and that if you have more than 1gb ram, make sure you're using a 686 kernel or have 486 with bigmem enabled.