VMWare in Fedora Land

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Tue, 16 Mar 2004, [iso-8859-1] Michael Mansour wrote:

> > > > I have VMWare v4.0.5 sitting here, running XP in
> > a
> > > > 20G virtual drive. I
> > > > was wondering if there was a way to tell it of a
> > > > seperate (real) drive I
> > > > have in my machine, which normally houses a 120G
> > XP
> > > > installation.  This
> > > > would be quite cool, as it would provide me a
> > > > network path to this 120G
> > > > partition which I could then read and write
> > from!
> >
> > > Do you install the vmware-tools package for
> > Windows XP
> > > within that virtual session? because if anything
> > would
> > > have that package would.
> >
> > I did, and there's nothing in there for it ..
> >
> > > When looking at the disk partitions in the virtual
> > XP
> > > machine, do you see other drives there or just the
> > > virtual drive?
> >
> > XP in VMWare can only see the virtual drive.
>
> Yeah, I don't think it's officially supported, it used
> to be years ago, but since then things have changed
> with VMWare. EMC own them now don't they?

Looking at the support pages at www.vmware.com, it appears that raw disks
are still almost fully supported.  The only thing you can't do (couldn't
ever do) is boot from a raw disk if it's SCSI.  You can have
(non-bootable) SCSI raw disks and you can boot from IDE raw disks.

Setting it up is a bit tricky ("like pulling your hard disk out and
sticking it in another machine"), but it can be done and it does appear to
be supported.  Plenty of instructions on line at www.vmware.com.

Actually, now that I look at it, running XP or Server 2003 from a raw disk
is not officially supported.  Win 2000 is, though.  Also, the instructions
say they apply to WinXP as well, although if it breaks you get to keep the
pieces.  One issue is that XP insists on re-invoking annoying activation
scheme every time you change between native boot and VM boot.  There
doesn't seem to be a workaround unless you have a corporate license.  See
the VMware newsgroups for more info.  Other reports indicate mixed
success.

>
> Michael.

-- 
		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs