vmware and dual boot

[Hubertus Hiden]

Alain Muls <alain.muls <at> telenet.be> writes:

> Instead of having to dual boot, I would like to setup vmware and use the 
> existing winxp partition as virtual machine. 

Hi Alain

ok, I'm talking about vmware server, but this should make no real difference.

Using a physically existing partition should work but be warned that this isn't
officially supported by vmware by now

> I followed the instructions on
> http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_disk_scsi_linux.html
> but when I try to set up the virtual machine I get an error about the fact 
> that the slected partition (/dev/sda - partition 2) is not valid. I suppose 
> it has something to do with the LSI stuff, but I do not understand that part. 
> Some advice please

Another issue that you'll run into is that hal.dll (which gets compiled by
windows setup I think) is likely to cause troubles with vmwares virtual hardware.

A solution that worked well for me was to setup a fresh version of windows in
vmware and then restore a backup from the physical machine into the virtual one.
If you need more detailled instructions (I have them on an unreachable system at
the moment) email me offlist since I'm a non frequent reader of this list.

Regards,
Hubertus

Ubuntu 5.10 on a DualCore Opteron with 2Gig Ram with Debian Sarge, IPCop and
Win2kServer in VMWare on the same machine