Today, I ended up using a most roundabout way to extract some files.
The files were in an ISO disc image on a flash drive. Unfortunately, the Windows 7 laptop I was using had no software on it that could extract files from an ISO and I did not feel like downloading and installing some. What the laptop did have available was a copy of XPMode (a Windows XP virtual machine).
My solution was to mount the ISO in the VM, then to share the VM’s CD drive. Then I opened the shared CD in the Windows 7 network location and copied the files.
I ended up creating an “intranet” on a single computer to extract files in a bizarrely circuitous manner. Not surprisingly, the network connections dialog of both the XP and 7 systems indicated up/downloading a pile of data even though no actual network activity took place.
It was an odd, yet interesting experience, but also a fun challenge in resourcefulness and problem-solving.
Well it happened again. I needed to copy a 664KB file from a Windows XP virtual machine to the Windows 7 host.
Unfortunately the VMWare tools weren’t working, so I could not simply drag-and-drop the file from the guest system to the host. I tried using a shared folder like I have in the past when drag-and-drop didn’t work, but that wasn’t working either. I did not want to simply reboot the VM since it was 21 hours away from hitting a full week of uptime, and I could not connect any USB devices to it either.
I did have Internet access in the guest OS, so I considered uploading the file to somewhere, but none of the few trusted websites that accept files that I that I could think of allowed anonymous file uploads and I didn’t feel like spending time to do any research.
I ended up deciding to use encode the (binary) file as plain text. I first considered uuencoding it since that’s how email attachments work, but I could not (sufficiently quickly) find any way to uuencode binary files (at least not in Windows). I settled on base64 because I quickly found a site that lets you upload a file and it then spits out the base64 encoded text for it, which was even easier than downloading a tool.
I uploaded the file and got the 885KB text. Unfortunately I could not paste it into the host because, not surprisingly, the shared clipboard function was not working. I decided to paste the encoded file into one of the text-dump sites like PasteBin or PasteBay. Unfortunately, neither one allowed a dump of that size. Despite a lack of a limited mentioned anywhere on PasteBay, it is indeed limited to 64KB, rendering it effectively useless for this. PasteBin on the other hand is limited to 500KB for non-Pro members), so I would create two pastes in PasteBin. I did so (setting them to expire in 10 minutes).
Navigating to the two pastes in the host required manually entering the URLs along with their gibberish paste-ID strings since again, the shared-clipboard wasn’t working. I copied both base64 strings (in correct order) to the first site’s decoder, had it decode the data and I downloaded a copy of the original binary file.
This whole process (including tests and experiments) took about 20 minutes. It was a lot more work than I could have imagined it would/should have taken, and it was certainly comical that it required branching out to the Internet proper just to copy a little file between a VM and its host. Nevertheless, it was amusing and even slightly educational.