Is it Fedora or VMWare
James C. Bevier
jim at jbsys.com
Mon Sep 27 17:10:48 UTC 2004
I have installed VMWare workstation 4.5.2 on FC3-T2 using Kernel 2.6.8-1.584
on an Athlon 64. I have been able to get everything to work, but had one
major problem along the way. I have a 30 GB ide disk on /dev/hdb that I use
for VMWare physical images. Here is the fdisk -l output:
Disk /dev/hdb: 30.0 GB, 30020272128 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3649 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 621 4988151 b W95 FAT32
/dev/hdb2 622 3649 24322410 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hdb5 622 1386 6144831 b W95 FAT32
/dev/hdb6 1387 1600 1718923+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hdb7 1601 3649 16458561 83 Linux
This give me 16065 sectors per cylinder and 58621185 sectors on the disk.
When I configure VMWare to use this disk for physical images it creats a
.vmdk that defines the physical disk. Here is the original .vmdk file:
# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=fffffffe
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="fullDevice"
# Extent description
RW 58633344 FLAT "/dev/hdb" 0
# The Disk Data Base
#DDB
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "3"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "16383"
ddb.geometry.heads = "16"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.geometry.biosCylinders = "1024"
ddb.geometry.biosHeads = "16"
ddb.geometry.biosSectors = "63"
ddb.adapterType = "ide"
As you will notice, the disk geometry is all wrong as well as the total
size. If I try to boot up the Windows 98 image on the disk, no image is
found. I am not sure where VMWare gets its information from in Fedora, but
it is wrong. If I modify the file to look like the following, everything
works fine:
# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=dbcd9a3c
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="fullDevice"
# Extent description
RW 58621184 FLAT "/dev/hdb" 0
# The Disk Data Base
#DDB
ddb.toolsVersion = "5184"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "3"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "16065"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.geometry.biosCylinders = "16065"
ddb.geometry.biosHeads = "255"
ddb.geometry.biosSectors = "63"
ddb.adapterType = "ide"
I know there were geometry reporting problems in Fedora Core 2. Is this a
problem for Fedora or a problem in VMWare? Just trying to help out others
that might want to use physical images in VMWare.
Jim
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