Ubuntu 9.04 host, Vista guest and Lightroom

[Brutan Gaster]

I posted my question originally on the ubuntu forums, and haven't had any replies...

The bottom line is that I have vista running in vbox, specifically to use lightroom. My lightroom catalog resides on my external drive with all of my photos. I set up my external drive as a shared folder w/ full access. When I open lightroom, and select file->open catalog, and browse to my lightroom.cat file, I get the error that lightroom cannot use that catalog because it cannot write to that location. If I browse to that folder on my guest machine I can create folders and files, so I know I have write permissions but lightroom for some reason does not. Is there some way to fix this?

BTW- here's the original post with my setup in more detail.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1230604

BM

[Brutan Gaster]

ok- I made some headway from the helpful folks at the adobe lightroom forums...

Turns out, which I've heard before, Lightroom can't have the catalog file located on a network drive. My simple understanding is that a shared folder appears to the guest os as a network folder, right? So, is there a way to make it not be this way?

BM

[Perryg]

Only option that I see is if this is a USB external drive you can set it up as a USB device and it should mount as a second (external) drive in Windows.

[Brutan Gaster]

Only option that I see is if this is a USB external drive you can set it up as a USB device and it should mount as a second (external) drive in Windows.

Thanks for the suggestion. Actually, it's an eSATA drive, plugged straight into the motherboard.

I don't know if it's normal, but it seems as though I'm only seeing usb 1.1 speeds in my virtual machine. USB 2.0 is already slow enough when working on 12mb files and that insane Lightroom catalog file (it's like a 2gb file, and growing). If I had known Lightroom functioned like this, I might not have gone w/ it, and tried something else. Bibble works in Linux, and seems to have a pretty loyal following. It would have been a better choice, I think.

How's the experimental work going on setting up your virtual machines to directly see your hard drives?

BM

[baf]

Yes it is possible to directly reach a physical partition.
I will suppose that your extra disk is /dev/sdb and that it's the first partiton you want to reach.

sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename filename.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sdb -partitions 1

Should give you a description file.
But first read the warnings in the manual (search for rawvmdk) . Using it in your host and guest at the same time WILL destroy content!
It must not be mounted in the host and you will have to fiddle with permissions and/or group membership to get it working.

[Brutan Gaster]

Warning: Raw hard disk access is for expert users only. Incorrect use or use
of an outdated configuration can lead to total loss of data on the physical
disk. Most importantly, do not attempt to boot the partition with the currently
running host operating system in a guest. This will lead to severe data
corruption.

Yikes! I'm not an expert user!!!

Well, I'll mess around w/ some things I guess and see if I can make anything work. To be safe, either I need to get lr to use the shared folder or hope the WINE makes some headway in compatibility with Virtualbox.

It's like 75% of the way there now...

BM