Hi all,
Have another Virtual Rails question.. as a reminder - I'm a Newbie - both in RoR and even fresher in Linux..
[Have a VirtualRails guest on VirtualBox running on a Windows Vista (64bit) host]
Anyway - My current problem goes as follows:
I've been using Virtual Rails for the last week or so.. pretty quick and with no special effort I got 13GB out of the available fixed 15GB used (I realise a more experienced Linux user could maybe have done what I did with less.. but I still want to know, as I feel 15 GB are pretty limiting and don't wish to constantly keep worrying about the capacity of my guest machine..)
So - have found some really great tutorials out there and followed a
procedure using GParted Live CD in order to copy the existing
partition into a bigger one.
(looked into these tutorials among many others:
http://www.my-guides.net/en/content/view/122/1/
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=364&start=30
)
Anyway, my existing (smaller) partition had a primary partition
(flagged with 'boot'), with ext4 file system and in addition the HD
had an extended small partition of about 690MB and inside had /dev/
sda5 marked with 'linux swap'.. I'm mentioning these setting by heart
now so hope I'm not using the terms wrongly (if I do - please forgive
me, I really am a newbie 
).. Anyway - tried to copy these setting
(both the primary partition and the extended one into the bigger HD I
put as a primary slave.. yet any combination I tried (and tried a lot,
everything I could think about, moving, resizing, leaving extra room
unallocated..) - gave me an error saying (referring to the /dev/sda5
copying only) - the source is bigger than the destination and
therefore the copying did not work..
(I suspect it might be related to this:
GParted -- Download )
Anyway, when I try to copy only the primary partition and resizing it
to the new bigger HD it works fine..but when I try to boot with the
new image as a primary master (after removing the smaller old vdi
file) - I get a blank black screen with a white underscore at the top
left (there's a better name to it I think.. just can't recall it
now..).
So - I did some reading.. these tutorials I mentioned had people also
having similar problems..
I tried: 1) botting with the original image as primary master and the
new bigger one as primary slave.. it works, but I'm not sure this is
ok and being a newbie I don't know whether that's a good thing to do
and what are the consequences.. anyway, I saw some people mentioning
runing this configuration (master & slave as described) and then
running Roadkil's BootBuilder and following some additional steps -
Download Roadkil's Boot Builder - MajorGeeks
)
when trying to run this file I'm greeted with this message for running
the exe file: "Unable to find an interpreter for ./bootbuild.exe" or
when trying to run the zip (from terminal that is) I get: "invalid
file (bad magic number): Exec format error".. trying to run from
Nautilus did not cause this thing to work (I did add execution
permissions since at first I seemed to have no executing permission on
this file and had different errors)
so - that did not do the work for me..
I realise what's happening is the new HD has no boot sector.. tried to
read about GRUB but was afraid to do some more damage as I really
don't feel I understand enough right now about Linux to do this,
unless you guys tell me I should (plus maybe some guildelines which
may help a bit..) anyway, I did read but wasn't sure it was the
solution I should study and follow..
I also tried to download Linux Mint 8 Helena CD from the website and
boot from there.. I couldn't do anything useful booting from the
Compatibility mode.. it did not have a recovery mode.. so used the
regular mode.. where the farthest I reached was to see I had another
HD containing more GB (resized to 40GB.. so saw something containing
38GB).. but didn't know where to go from there and even how to access
it and how to repair the boot information there.. also tried to run in
this config GParted (saw the CD of Helena had it) - but for some
reason it did not run or do anything and anyway - Ifelt I was
improvising too much for my beginner level..)
So - this is where I'm at.. pretty stuck.
If anybody here can tell me how should this be done (if at all.. ), I'd greatly (really!!) appreciate it.. Otherwise, if there's no way to resize the Virtual Rails partition to a bigger one or if there's no other bigger version (perhaps from a DVD installation and not a CD one with less things on it (like OpenJDK instead of Sun Java for instance..) - I'll switch to a different solution - and in which case (still I'd love to know and learn how the problem I described above should be solved..) - I wonder if there are any recommendations you could share..
I simoltaneously installed a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my VB (with 100GB *grin*) thinking I should be doing the whole configuration and stuff by myself now.. I'm planning to follow mainly the tutorials from Rails Wiki - http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/getting-started/installation/linux - and Ubuntu RoR page - RubyOnRails - Community Help Wiki - hoping the knowledge I've gained so far will be sufficient to be able to do this correctly.. even these two links do not completely overlap and there some more alternate ways I found.. so I mainly feel insecure here and very eager to be able to go back to study RoR and write some code as well (while learning linux and using it)
So - hope this post was clear enough.. I'd greatly appreciate your answers.
Many thanks!
Best, tino
