Install Virtualbox Without Admin Privileges

System from a usb stick without. The Oracle Database Administrator. Install the Oracle Software. Because SYSDBA and SYSOPER are the most powerful database privileges, the ADMIN OPTION is not. Virtualbox installer does not ask for admin rights (UAC) automatically. Since Virtualbox needs to install drivers, it always needs admin privileges.

Portable software as a general rule is written in poor languages. AutoHotkey, AutoIt and NSIS are the three main languages in use, because they allow people to moderately easily produce not enormous binaries and have a surprisingly low initial learning curve (though later on you hit plenty of walls with them; none of them is suited as a general purpose programming language).

I speak this as the developer of the PortableApps.com Launcher, which I did in NSIS as the launchers already in use were NSIS, and as size matters a lot (that killed things like Python outright, though using the RPython parts of PyPy with the garbage collector ripped out would have worked---I checked it out and was able to successfully compile <100KB executables; D was disqualified for some reason I do not recall, Go for its heavy runtime even after ripping out the Unicode tables, &c.), and as I was not at all comfortable in C or C++ at the time.

I rather suspect that a large part of the reason for the apparently poor language choice is that the people that develop and use such things are strongly predominantly young people who are having to rove from computer to computer; as they get older, they tend to end up with a machine of their own and so no longer need portable apps. I don't any more, for example (and I don't use Windows any more either). The developers of these things are in consequence similarly young and have not yet learned good sense in programming (I include myself in that category, though I reckon the PortableApps.com Launcher to contain best-of-class engineer in the portable software space---five years later, at age 22, I am surprisingly unashamed of it, though now I would write it in Rust; I should try that one of these years).

We’ve got a Windows 10 notebook and an old game that won’t run on this version of Windows. I have install disks for Windows 98, but we do not have administrator access so we cannot install VirtualBox.

QEMU can do this, kind of.

Went to https://qemu.weilnetz.de/w64/.

Downloaded installer. Ran it.

But it wants admin password…

OK, went to Win 10 machine where I do have admin rights and installed there (both machines 64 bit). It went into C:Program Filesqemu.

Copied the qemu directory onto a USB stick and then onto the machine with no admin rights, just under the user account (C:Usersusernameqemu) Its plc professional edition keygen crack for serato dj.

Opened CMD prompt and cd’d into qemu, which is where the executable files live. Ran

This created a 1 GB hard drive in native QEMU format (qcow2). So far so good. Tried to boot it.

OK, the accelerator probably needs admin access to install a driver or something (I’m guessing, and too lazy to find out for sure; for now I just want to see if something will work). But it might run (slowly) without it.

Note: this just says to read the CD from the actual D: (could also be an image file) and to boot from D:.

Booted from CD ROM!

Then install — no worries. Step through the usual tedious Windows 98 install procedure. But it is slow. The lack of acceleration is apparent.

Screen shot of the Windows 98 install dialogue inside the QEMU virtual machine.

Once install done, shutdown and rebooted with:

which boots from C: not the cdrom (D:)

Install completed OK.

Machine boots OK and runs but yes is very slow.

Put in game CD

Not found.

Cannot seem to be able to change CDs once VM is running. Need to reboot to change CDs. I don’t know much about QEMU. Closed down and rebooted with game CD in drive. Installed no worries.

Tried to install SciTech display doctor, but it could not find the info it needed, so stuck with 640×480, 16 colours. Tried reboot with -vga cirrus selected on command line, did not help, Windows 98 still just using generic VGA with minimal capabilities.

Booted without CD:

Conclusion and to do

It works but is very slow, though the host system is not all that powerful. OK for basic board games, but nothing fancy.

Having said that, I have not spent any time trying to optimise it and it looks to me like anything that does not need admin rights would work, and so I suspect the graphics and sound and all that could be sorted out if I wanted to spend the time. There might be something I can do with acceleration, don’t know yet.

The bottom line is that QEMU does give a working VM running on a Windows 10 host without the need for administrator rights, but it is slow. Could be useful for messing around with old files or programs. Once an application is open, it’s not too bad as long as it is not very graphics-intensive.