drop hd? necessary? Possible?

[edstevens]

VBox 4.1.14 on Win 7 Home Premium 64bit host.

Orcle Linux 5.7 64bit guest.

Working through an exercise of building and Oracle db with ASM. Once I have the basic vm created and guest additions installed, I created 4 additional hard disks, with

Code: Select all

VBoxManage createhd --filename asm1.vdi --size 5120 --format VDI --variant Fixed

usinge 'filename asm1.vdi' through asm4.vdi'. A few steps later things went south so I wanted to drop the hd devices and start over. Couldn't find a VBoxManage command to do that, but it seemed simple enough to just drop the devices from the vm settings (usng the GUI) then physically delete the vdi files from the host. But when I re-ran the VboxManage createhd command (for just the first of the four files) , it complained that the file already existed. It did create the file. 'Vboxmanage list hdds' listed all 4 files. I don't find any command to 'delete' or 'drop' an hdd file. How do I clean up and start over?

[mpack]

You are doing this on a Win7 host and yet you are using the command line... why? And you are using multiple teeny fixed sized hard drives, instead of one decent sized dynamic drive... why?

The fact that you have talked yourself into doing things in a most oblique way makes me wary of getting involved.

[edstevens]

You are doing this on a Win7 host and yet you are using the command line... why?

I'm just following/adapting from a white paper on setting up 'self-learning' system for Oracle ASM. There are several things in that paper that struck me as odd and I am trying to get some contact info the the guy that wrote it to ask about that very question, along with a couple of others.

And you are using multiple teeny fixed sized hard drives, instead of one decent sized dynamic drive... why?


My main drive for the guest is allocated at 20gb and dynamic. These small files are specifically to be put under the control of Oracle ASM to get some practice managing an ASM system. For their intended purpose the fact that they are very small is irrelevant


The fact that you have talked yourself into doing things in a most oblique way makes me wary of getting involved.


BTW you will notice that in my opening post I stated that I went back and used the GUI config tool to drop the disks from the virtual machine. But they are still registered to VBox. After broadening my search through the user guide found the 'VboxManage closemedium' command. In earlier searches, since what I was trying to reverse was a 'createhd' I was looking for something like 'delete....' or 'drop....'

[mpack]

My main drive for the guest is allocated at 20gb and dynamic. These small files are specifically to be put under the control of Oracle ASM to get some practice managing an ASM system. For their intended purpose the fact that they are very small is irrelevant

I was more curious about why they were fixed size. I was less curious about why they were small: that usually goes hand in hand with making them fixed size.

ps. Talking about oblique techniques, note the "quote" mechanism provided by the site, and like I have used here!