I'm having trouble with win2k networking on vmware and would appreciate some help.

What I did:

First I installed gentoo's vmware-player package. Then I used EasyVMX to generate the necessary config files and an empty HD image file. So far, so good.

Then I needed to install win2k itself. I didn't have an install CD so I just bittorrented an image. Before anyone complains, I should mention that my college has a site license for win2k pro open to all students, but going through the proper channels would have required emailing the admins for access to the download site, waiting for them to respond, etc. This was just faster.

I installed win2k in the VM with no problems. Windows started normally with no funny quirks.

Finally, I had to install vmware-tools to get ethernet access. To do this, I followed the instructions on this site. These consisted of downloading a trial version of vmware workstation, setting the VM to mount the windows.iso file that comes with the workstation, and run the installer on this 'disk'. Then I followed the installer's simple instructions, rebooted, and I was done.

Or so I thought. The display and mouse drivers work beautifully, but there is no network connection. Vmware's documentation said that when booting win2k with the ethernet enabled in vmware (as it was when I booted), windows would auto-detect the virtual NIC and set up the network while booting. But when I look in the control panel, I don't see any connections. The add/remove hardware wizard in the control panel says this about the ethernet adapter:

The drivers for this device are not installed. (Code 28)

This is after I explicitly told the vmware-tools installer to install the VMXNet NIC driver.

As a quick test, I booted the same VM from a dsl image by telling it to boot from the CD rather than the HD. The internet worked flawlessly on startup. The problem can't be in the vmware-player installation, so where is it?

Looks like I found a workaround. I simply created the VM with the trial version of vmware-workstation and ran the image with vmware-player. (Since I didn't bother getting a 30 day activation key, I couldn't run it on workstation directly.)

I used the same .iso as before and noticed more device drivers being installed. The networking worked both before and after the vmware-tools installation. If the glove fits...

i'd suggest using vmware-server not vmware-player.... it's just as free now, with much much more functionality.

also, vmx files themselves are *very* simple... you could probably have just edited it yourself.