Hello all,

I've been searching google and this board for a while, and I can't find an answer to my specific problem. My two hard drives (listed in my sig) are not set up in RAID, and I don't have LVM set up, so they're seen as separate by Suse.

I won't get into the reasons why I need Windows on my machine, but it's unfortunately a must-have for some scientific applications I need.

The problem is, when I boot with either the WinXP install disc or the 64-bit Windows (for AMD64) disc, the install program won't recognize the presence of my hard drives or my DVD/CDROM. I have tried the F6 option to install my MSI motherboard drivers/hard drive controllers from the manufacturer's disc, but I just get an error message that my floppy/peripheral drive is not detected. At that point, I'm only given the option to abort installation.

Am I missing something? Do I need to go back and mess with the partitioning of Suse? It's currently installed on the 1st drive (sda). Since I'm still a noob, I'm afraid to mess with the partioning. With the help of a friend, it's taken me weeks to get the kernel, nvidia drivers, and mplayer all happy together.

Thanks in advance!! Sorry for the long post. If you need more info, please let me know.

Why not use vmware? It simulates standard hardware so windows shouldn't have any driver problems. And it saves you rebooting all the time.

As a newb, I'm not familiar with vmware, but I'll google around for it. In the mean time, would you mind giving a little more explanation as to what it is and how it works? Thanks for the reply!!

It lets you run windows programs in linux

-Joey

vmware is a virtual machine. It runs in a window on your linux box and simulates hardware for the use of any other OS. The OS you install in vmware thinks vmware is just a normal computer. The great thing about it is that the hardware it simulates is very standard, so it gets rid of driver issues.

Cool, thanks. I downloaded it. How much is this gonna cost me when the trial period is up? Or, is there an "alternative" way to get a licensed version?

I don't actually know how much vmware costs--I tried out the trial version for a while because I thought it was pretty cool, but I didn't really have a use for it so I never bought it. For personal use it is probably pretty cheap.

I imagine it would be possible to get a registration key illegally but I wouldn't recommend it. If the program is useful, just buy it!

I'm not sure about multiple drives, but i do know that windows needs to be at the beginning of the the hard drive if you're dual booting, ie install windows first and linux second - letting grub/lilo overwrite the nt bootloader. Maybe you could try setting the disk you want to install windows on to be the master and the one with SuSE on to be the slave and install it at the beginning of the master drive.
A word about VMWare, if you want to use 3D graphics then it's not for you, VMWare uses a generic software graphics emulator that will only provide 2D support. And although i can't condone it there are alternative ways of getting it. Try DCGui "http://dcgui.berlios.de/"
good luck