Question about VMware

[eXtremist]

Okay.. I have WinME and Linux on my computer. ME lives in hda1 (2 gb) and linux lives everywhere else. I want to use VMware with the already-installed copy of ME. I know VMware can be used in raw disk mode, but will this work for a partition?

I know you have to have the disk unmounted, so I unmounded hda1. However, when I go into VMware, it tells me my hard disk is inaccessible. Does this only work with whole disks? I mean, if I had windows on hda and linux on hdb, would it work then?

greg

[digital_spawn]

i ran linux within windows using vmware , i had windows on /dev/hda1 and linux '/' on /dev/hdb1 - i never reinstalled linux inside vmware, just used the already installed stuff, i was using win2000, - i was also able to run the installed win2k from linux using vmware, - the third thing i did drove me crazy was - i was in win2k and booted the same version of win2k using vmware, it started out fine , after the startup screen - my system crashed - that day the network went dumb :D :D :(

[bdg1983]

I've been wondering the exact same as you. raw disk/plain disk ??? Printed just about all of their documentation.

Would like to have Linux as Host and then install W2K to a 2GB partition (not a pre-existing install of W2K) through VMWare.

I did have quite a few conversations through email with VMWare support a few months ago and they said it should work. Never did though. Suggested I upgrade to 2.3 at the time and that still didn't work.

Since it will be on one of my work PC's and I've been away on disability (returned this week), I have not had a chance to try this again. Damn projects interfering with my Linux testing. The nerve of them. At least both of my main PC's are both Linux and only one of them I use VMWare for Win98 right now. Need Groupwise and Heat access.

Hopefully within the next couple of weeks, and since I want to try the Caldera Openlinux Workstation 3.1 beta, I am planning to use one of my other PC's at the office to attempt to get it to work before I install OL 3.1

If you haven't got it working yet by then, I will be happy to let you know on how I do.

[digital_spawn]

i never went through a lot of reading in case of vmware, i just installed a evaluation copy of the software and the setup was straight forward - installed vmware > made 1000mb image for win2k with floppy and cdrom enabled > before installing changed the vmware bios sequence to boot from cdrom > booted with the cdr and installed the fake os , pretty simple , use the wizard, - dont forget to change the boot seq. later - vmware needs a lot of ram - if you want to run win9x under linux try bochs (http://www.bochs.com/), i did not try it for win2k :)

[eXtremist]

Well, I got it working fine on an image of WinME.. My problem is that I already have multiple partitions. I don't want to have to make an image if I already have 2GB partitioned off. Ideally, I'd like to use this partition so I can load windows from within linux, rebooting only when I want to play some 3D hardware intensive game.

I think (not sure) that it will only work on a full disk. I mean, if Linux is on hda, no matter what partition, the raw disk would have to be something other than hda.

This really sucks because my family uses WinME, and I SSH home from school and work to do any programming projects. SO, when they are using windows, I can't do my work!

I really don't want to have to install ANOTHER copy of WinME as an image just to get it working in linux.. bah!

[ph34r]

It works, you just need to run vmware as root to have access to the partition.

Also, the first time you fire it up in vmware, all sorts of new hardware is gonna be found. Then, when you actually boot to it (not in vmware) it finds all the old stuff again....

[deadlock]

ph34r:

When you boot into Windows (normally), it will redetect all of your real (as opposed to VMWare virtual) hardware, but it will create two hardware configurations; from then on you get a choice which one you want to use - i think you can rename them, so you can call one VMWare and one Real, or whatever.

Actually, being able to boot Windows inside Linux is fairly cool and with VMWare, i think you can actually save the session to disk (a bit like Win2k's Hibernate feature). Which means that using VMWare as an alternative to Wine is viable. Although it does take a bit of work to get the virtual network card to see the real network, IIRC.

wonk

[eXtremist]

Originally posted by ph34r:
<STRONG>It works, you just need to run vmware as root to have access to the partition.
</STRONG>


uGh!! So any normal user can't run VMware from a raw partition? Well that's useless for my needs.