Is it Fedora or VMWare

[James C. Bevier]

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