cfdisk not working in VMWare
 

Hey guys, got an interesting thing here. I just recently got a trial of VMWare Workstation 5 and I plan on buying the full version. But anyways, I have installed about 3 different OS's on 3 different Virtual Machines. I have installed XandrOS, Win2K Server, and Fedora and they seem fine. However, I want my slack! I created a new virtual machine and chose other linux 2.4 kernel (using slack 10.0) and got it to load. However, when I try to run cfdisk I get a message telling me it cannot locate a hard drive for this. I have already checked and tried leaving the virtual drive as unallocated and as allocated to many different sizes. Still no luck. Has anyone else encountered this problem? I would love to know the answer.

Hi,

Bear in mind that as a default the virtual disks in VMware are SCSI types, connected to a "simulated" SCSI host adapter [at least in my old version -- not sure about version 5]. So it may be that the kernel used in the install system is not compiled with the correct scsi driver. I'm not sure about Slackware, but anyway you can try these:

1 - change the VMware config to emulate an IDE disk instead of a SCSI type (not recommended by VMware for performance reasons)

2 - in the slackware installation system see what scsi chipset is emulated by VMware (I used to know this by heart but I forget -- use "lspci" to find it out); then see if there is a module by trying "modprobe xxxx" where xxxx is the module used for that chipset (a quick google search).

Also, some floppy-based distros have an extra floppy containing scsi drivers -- this is all very dependent upon the distro (Fedora's kernel obviously had less trouble ;) )

Good luck with it!