VMWare on XP guest OS RedHat no boot

thejackal · 11-13-2003, 06:14 AM

I have VMWare workstation 4.01 installed on my WinXP machine. Afther that I installed RedHat 9 as guest OS, the installation went smooth only at the end of the installation progress you need to reboot in order to go into the redhat gui, but afther the VMware logo I get a black screen and it stops. I tried to install an older version of redhat but all have the same problem. I don't know what to do, I can't see any kind of error kind or something. What is causing this problem??

jfshadow · 11-13-2003, 06:36 AM

Did you install the bootloader, either grub or lilo, to the MBR on, I'm assuming, /dev/hda within vmware?

thejackal · 11-13-2003, 07:15 AM

No I didn't install a boot loader because I start RedHat from VMWare, is it still neccessery to install a boot loader?

jfshadow · 11-13-2003, 06:56 PM

Yes, it is. From within vmware, you are still booting an operating system and if you are installing linux, it thinks it itself is /dev/hda even though physically it is not. You still see the BIOS information, etc and it is looking for a boot loader in its master boot record. So, go ahead and reinstall and install lilo or grub to the virtual master boot record.

thejackal · 11-14-2003, 07:07 AM

Yes it is now working, thx man

jfshadow · 11-14-2003, 07:17 AM

No problem. Glad to be of help

froZenX · 11-14-2003, 11:07 AM

What does VMWare necessarily do? Does it install OS's within WinXP's partition, or act as a startup from a disk inserted when using WinXP and installing an OS while WinXP is still running, and also run other OS's at the same time too?

Confused

I got the software, just need to know what it does.

thejackal · 11-14-2003, 12:33 PM

you install a OS in XP while running XP, you can run your primary OS and with vmware a secondary OS at the same time. It uses a virtual hd so no OS files are written on your XP partition.

jfshadow · 11-14-2003, 06:31 PM

Yea, it creates a virtual partition, which is basically a chunk of memory of a size that you specify. The new 'Host' operating system is installed into that chunk of memory in a .dsk file. VMWare gives an interface and handles the flow of each OS bootup. What's cool is that you can have an entire network environment running as many virtual machines as you have memory for.

froZenX · 11-17-2003, 04:17 PM

so that means i can install maybe a different distro out before i install it, like maybe Mandrake, when I already got my Fedora?

So you said it installs in the "virtual" memory... so like it puts all this data in a .dsk (or what you said) file and put it in my "My Virtual Machines" folder?

If so on both, THATS WICKED.

froZenX · 11-17-2003, 07:33 PM

anyone?

mrbowlman · 11-17-2003, 08:09 PM

vmware is a virtual machine program. It emulates the basic hardware of an x86 system, bios and all. You specify the amount of system RAM that the guest OS can use, and how much HD space the virtual machine will use. It will then boot a virtual machine with that amount of RAM and HD as big as you specified.

Basically, it's like a seperate computer inside a window. It's pretty slick.

You would be able to install as many different distro's as you have HD space for, and you can run as many simultaniously as you have RAM for.

froZenX · 11-17-2003, 08:40 PM

nice... THANK YOU SO MUCH.

I got myself a good 180 gb total in my windoze partition plus my 1 gig of ram..