[Nottingham] Debian & VMWare Partitions

Richard Hayes ricky at domainarena.net
Mon Dec 4 21:28:46 GMT 2006


Hi Guys.

Bit of an odd one this:

I've got a 64bit AMD Windoze XP PC, with 2 IDE harddisks, each partitioned into 2. Partitions 0,2,3 are all used, and partition 1 is full of data that I don't mind getting rid of. The data that I don't mind getting rid of WindowsXP 64 trial ;) The boot loader on the machine is configured to show XP (partition 0) and XP64 (partition 1).

I've also got VMWare and some Debian ISOs (i686). What I'd like to do is use VMWare to map it's primary harddisk to parition 1, install Debian onto this partition (with some kind of Window manager, XGL would be nice but any will be OK - see later). And then, still having my original bootloader pointing to partition 1, have a dual boot with XP and Debian.

Here's a quote from the VMWare help about the kind of disk configuration that I plan to use in VMWare:

Raw Disk 
A raw disk directly accesses an existing local disk or partition. You can use raw disks if you want VMware Workstation to run one or more guest operating systems from existing disk partitions. Raw disks may be set up on both IDE and SCSI devices. 

One concern is that VMWare will make Debian think that all my hardware had changed when/if it boots on the main box. But, as far as I'm aware, VMWare virtualises the hardware so it should be OK. I would not install the Desktop in VMWare, I would install this when it's runnin on the main box. Doing an lspci shows up some hardware properly (network cards etc), but the video card shows as VMWare SVGA II PCI card (apparently).

Another concern is that the whole 32/64 bit thing will mess things up. Though my machine is an AMD64,  I run 32bit Windows XP. In this runs 32bit VMWare, which will no doubt be emulating/virtualising 32bit hardware. Will 32bit Debian run ok when it's run on the 64bit hardware?

I can hear you ask "but why?!". Well, I don't have a CDROM drive in the machine, and I don't have access to a CD burner (well, they're both complete lies, but I'd like to know if it's possible to add an OS in this way) :D

Your thoughts gentlemen!

(And please excuse my spelling, either that or accept 'partion' as the new word for partition)

Kind regards,

Richard Hayes
DomainArena
ricky at domainarena.net
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