Disk Partition and VMware
 

Hi!

I would like to thank everyone from this forum that has been helping speed-up my learning process of Linux. After many trials with Fedora 8, I decided to use Ubuntu 6.06. I have a school project and this project involving running two instateenous of Windows Server 2003 on VMware Server version 1.5 with Ubuntu as host OS. The following are output from invoking fdisk -l command:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1305 10482381 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1306 1828 4200997+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 1829 3916 16771860 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 3917 7296 27149850 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 3917 4700 6297448+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 4701 5222 4192933+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 5223 7296 16659373+ 83 Linux


and output from invoking cat/etc/fstab:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/sda3 /Server2003-1 ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/sda7 /Server2003-2 ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/sda2 /boot ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/sda5 /home ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/sda6 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

If I need to change file system type on /dev/sda3 from ext3 to ntfs, what is (are) the command(s) that need to be invoked? umount -t ext3 /dev/sda3; mkfs -t ntfs /dev/sda3, mount -t ext3 /dev/sda3. I am using WMWare Server ver.1.5 and installation of Server2003 by "creating a new virtual disk option" only allows OS to be created at /dev/sda1 (the disk volume is very limited and might not enough for Active Directory and Server2003). At the same time, installation by using "physical disk" option at /dev/sda3 does not allow Server2003 to be installed on /dev/sda3 because file system, in this case ext3, is not recognized the file system (I expected this). Am I going to the correct direction for this issue, such as installing the correct application such as VMware Server? If everything doing weel, I also would like to change file sytem at /dev/sda7 to mount the second Server2003. Thank you for your contribution!

Uhm, why not install the windows in a fully virtual machine, you don't need to play with filesystems, just make virtual disks (basically just files on your ext3 (or any) partition in vmware-server.

Or why not use cfdisk or gparted to get more fancy partition editing.

Hi Teek,

Thanks! I will give a shot on gparted method. This morning, when I started my VMware (login as a root), the following is output:
root@TSH-UB606-L001:/# vmware
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key

and invoking gksu vmware command:
root@TSH-UB606-L001:/# gksu vmware
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key

(gksu:6833): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:

VMWare GUI runs perfectly if I login as another user. This error never happened before, any idea?

Thanks!

I am getting the same error with gparted. Yesterday gparted worked fine. Today I get

dell-1 /home/dave # gparted
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key

(gparted-bin:11010): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:


I can't figure what changed in that time to cause this. Any one got any ideas?

OK, in my case it was simple. I cannot run gparted as root. The proper way is to run gparted as a non-root user, you then get a GUI asking for the root password. I don't know the details, but I understand that this is a kind of security safe guard to prevent the root user unknowingly launching malicious scripts that might have been hidden behind GUIs.

Could someone please explain (or suggest reading for) why launching gparted (or similar) as a non-root and then enterring a root password into a GUI is in any way safer. I can't see the difference.

cheers
FN