VMWare question - device /mnt/cdrom is confused
 

Hi all,

I finally managed to get my VMWare up and running - this includes the VM Tools thank's to mpegman!!
But I have one major drama:-

first of all I am running winXP with a Linux Mandrake 9.1 guest OS. I am not sure why but everytime I go to the /mnt/cdrom directory my Linux OS hangs up. I have tried a few different settings in the VMWare Machine Settings including 1) autodetect cdrom and 2) use physical drive option... or 3) connect exclusively to this virtual machine...

Am I supposed to manually mount the cdrom every time I boot the vm machine?? Am I supposed to umount it everytime I boot the system?? I have tried a whole bunch of different things and it still doesn't work like it is supposed to.

some of the functions I have tried include:

1) mount /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom - to try to connect the cdrom myself... This seemed to work until I went to the /mnt/cdrom directory and the system just hung.

2) umount /mnt/cdrom - to try to remove the cdrom device - this seemed to work until I went to open my /mnt/hgfs folder to view some shared folders and it hung again...

3) I clicked the cdrom icon at the bottom right-hand of the vm window and tried to disconnect the cdrom and it still hung when I went to view my hgfs files.

Please help!!

TIA

e-regular

Hello, I just moved your thread to Linux - Software. I think it fits better here. Member Intro is a good place to say 'hello', but questions should eb asked in other forums.

Personally, if I were you, I'd dump VMWare and rather go with Virtual PC. VMWare is slow and difficult to configure and I had similar problems with Redhat7 when I installed it. Virtual PC isn't ideal but it runs Linux slightly better, although it's clearly less catered for. However, if you're more technically inclined, installing Linux on VPC is a snap. I'm running Red Hat and Knoppix and Corel linux on VPC with ease.

Sorry, I don't use VMware in Windows. I used it in LINUX. Runs flawlessly, who say VMware is slow. Runs Windows 98 the same speed if I had it running in its native environment. I also did not have any problems with Windows XP although its slow because it does not cache as much as Windows 98. Windows XP was also slow in its native environment even though every fancy feature that it has is turned off.

In Windows XP, you have to change the permissions for the CD-ROM drive to be used for VMware (I think). VMware handles CD-ROM, ZIP, JAZ, and LS-120 (aka Super Disk) at low-level. Also is DMA enabled for your CD-ROM in Windows. VMware has a setting in its own BIOS. Setting to 32-bit or DMA will help. You could run VMware as an admin, but be careful. You might trash your computer.

The fstab file located under /etc mounts the desired mediums upon boot up. Are you having problems mounting the floppy disk drive too. If so, you could have a problem with supermount.

I suggest you do a dual boot instead of running LINUX in an Virtual Machine like program. If you want to try out LINUX with out installing, use Knoppix or any CD based distributions.

BTW, I suggest people that are using VMware should have 512 megabytes of memory or more to really get a good use of it.

Hi all,

I tried what you said with regards to the Autoplay in winXP and it still plays up (the DMA settings were fine)... so I decided to try VirtualPC just to see how it compares to VMWare... Now I am having problems getting it to detect my Video Card - ATI Radeon 9500 Pro... what to do what to do?? I shall check in the hardware questions.

c ya'll later