Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Shared Folders in Virtual PC 2007

I use Virtual Machines extensively but got caught this weekend with something I've not really found documented anywhere.

I was in the middle of restoring an 18GB Oracle 9i database, and rather than muck up my dev. machine I decided a virtual machine was the obvious answer.

All went well until I tried the Oracle "imp" tool to import the database from a "Shared Folder". It got part way through and complained of a corrupted backup file.

I tried again with a different version of Oracle and the same error occurred.

It turns out that the "Shared Folders" have a limitation on file size like that of FAT which I'm guessing is a 32bit pointer as 2GB seems to be the limit.

The simple answer to the problem is to map a network drive or use UNC but I was quite surprised that the facility of the VM additions failed in such a strange way.

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