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

[Jonathan Stickel]

short:  You can run a virtual machine via VMWare using a raw drive on SATA.

long:  I have a laptop with a SATA drive.  The first partition is NTFS 
running corporate windows xp.  Later partitions are for gentoo Linux.  I 
have a dual-boot setup using grub.  Inside Linux I run a VMWare virtual 
machine which accesses the NTFS raw partition.  When I boot the virtual 
machine, I see my entire grub menu as if I were booting the computer 
itself.  I just make sure I choose windows then, although if I 
accidentally choose Linux, I simply get an error.  In windows I have two 
"device profiles" one called "real" and one called "virtual".  I choose 
virtual when I am running the virtual machine, of course.  When I set 
this all up, I remember I had to manually hack one of the vmware config 
files to make the SATA work.  You can find the info in the vmware 
forums, I think.  The other problem that came up was the windows xp 
authorization: it may think you have installed it twice due to the 
greatly different device profiles.  Once I managed to get around that, 
it hasn't bothered me since.  Now everything works seamlessly except for 
some occasional networking issues.

Hope some of this helps.

Regards,
Jonathan


Dylan Beaudette wrote:
> 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!
> 
>