[Gllug] I have a windows problem

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Tue, 27 Jun 2006, will wrote:

> Simon Perry wrote:
> > I think you are confusing how VMWare works. I only have experience
> > of the free player but the "VM" stands for Virtual Machine.
> > 
> > The virtual machine it creates runs from a set of files stored on
> > the host operating system.
> > 
> > The disc it provides the OS you are installing is virtual as well.

> VMWare has the ability to use a physical disc partition as the drive for a
> virtual machine.

This is completely correct and I've done exactly this on my wife's
work laptop (so more complex h/ware) as a last resort (we run a MS
free house).  This was about 4 months ago, and I only ever bothered
with it for a short while for one app that didn't work in Wine.  But
this app was not used much in her department so this kludge quickly
became unneeded and she's happier with evilwm anyway :)

This feature of vmware is a convenient way to install a new Linux dist
to a spare partition for later actual use, especially if you know UNIX
well in general and know how to deal with h/ware changes between
boots.  Installing Windows is less useful other than perhaps slightly
faster disk access as it'll pretty much only boot under the platform
you installed with.  But then I've not used windows for more than a
few hours in the past decade so I'm really no expert.

There were a few walk-throughs on booting existing installs of windows
under a direct disk access mode of vmware workstation, when I googled
a while back.  Basically you need to set up a 2nd hardware profile
under windows, as this was my wifes PC I hacked Administrator and
created a "docked" profile so no-one would notice, this is set to have
very generic h/ware for vmware, but there are some specifics like
turning off acpi and using the standard IDE controller
(http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=12469).  I found
it reasonably straightforward after a number of re-google attempts
when I had it bluescreening at me when vmware was trying to boot up.
I really haven't used windows much so it was that side I struggled
with most, I know vmware, pc hardware and linux fine.

I also used the option for transactional replayable disks, so it was
reading from the real windows install, but writing changes to an undo
log.  I chose to never save the changes so had to repeat a bunch of
h/ware settings edits which needed a few fake reboots (the disk
changes relate to the vmware session not the xp boot) and some routing
messing (I was also tunneling in to a box, so the windows session
appeared to be on the right lan at her work).  This had the benefit of
never doing any harm to the windows side, but I'm fairly confident
from what I'd read that I could have risked it.  I think at the time I
was also cdrom booting linux, not wanting to hurt her work installed
windows install.  I was lucky it had a Dee drive as they call it empty
for Slackware.  I've sinced resized the ntfs under linux and just let
slackware run it's default lilo and had it still able to boot, so I
guess things changed from what I remember yonks ago when you were
supposed to dd 512bytes of starts of partitions and use them for doing
NT4 and Linux booting?

> This might not have been a feature of the 'player' but it is of the
> 'server'.  The server is also now 'free' BTW.

I've found player seems to be just like Workstation, but only lack the
ability to easily configure under a GUI (which I found quite nice to
work with, even for a cmdline nerd like me!), so it should be able to
do everything you can under Workstation.  Oh and minus a few things
that you'd click under Workstation, so the replayable disks,
suspending and similar are lacking as those need buttons.

But the config, however complex, should still boot a working machine,
and you can even hand edit the files, and create fake images etc
(http://www.easyvmx.com/), I must admit I've not tried on raw images
yet though.  I also saw when they announced the server was also free,
but not tried.  I have a feeling it might be like the GSX only cut
down, so may not have graphical screen accelleration and might be
mainly for running a bunch of virtual servers headless for clustering
and h/ware utilisation type things?

Damion

-- 
Damion Yates - damion.yates at gmail.com
Ex- BBC and Siemens engineer, currently on a long chunk of paternity
leave.
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