[vox-tech] dual-boot machine / vmware / SATA drives...

[Dylan Beaudette]

Hi everyone,

recently purchased a new machine for the lab, and have plan on using it for 
the following : 


two SATA drives, one with WinXP the other with Debian Linux. 

Right now it boots into Linux by default, and will provide remote-login 
services among other things to our lab members. The Windows XP install was 
going to be accessed via VMware, with linux as the host operating system of 
course, for people who actually sit down at the machine. I was planning on 
accessing the first SATA disk in raw mode as opposed to creating a virtual 
disk for windows to live in. however, according to the vmware docs, raw 
access mode will not work with SCSI disks. with kernel 2.6 SATA devices 
appears as SCSI devices- so it seems that this approach will not work.

one possible work-around would be to dump windows on the first disk, format 
with ext3, and create a large VMware virtual disk in its place. This option 
should work fine.

one small problem (?) -- my bootloader (grub) is stored in the MBR of the 
first SATA disk, will re-partitioning this disk destroy the MBR ? and if so, 
how can i safely restore it ? 

any comments / thoughts -- I am pretty sure that the above is reasonable, but 
I would sure appreciate any other options!

thanks!


-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soils and Biogeochemistry Graduate Group
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341