using an already installed Windows XP under VMware server?
 

I've got Windows XP already installed on my HD, as I was previously dual-booting. I just downloaded VMWare server, to play with it. Is it possible to make a VM w/ an already installed version of windows? I don't really want to remove windows entirely from my HD, but I don't have enought room to make another partition for a VM. Any way to do this? Could linux read and write to the disk on a VM?

Yea, absolutely. Vmware can actually boot off of physical harddrives and partitions. Theres no need to create a new partition at all.

can you explain how to do this? I tried to set it up as "Use Physical Disk" under the Custom heading, using the "Use Individual Partitions" radio button and /dev/hda1 as the device. The error it gave me was
Suggestions?

Moderators, if this is in the wrong forum, feel free to move it.

Have you tried using /dev/hda? Its suppose to be able to search for partitions automatically.

I haven't. But I still need to set it to look for individual partitions right? as opposed to the whole disk?

EDIT: Ok, I tried that, and it let me finish setting up the virtual machine. Except now it gives me a grub error when booting
Any ideas?

I have made it work, with a dual boot system you have to give access to the complete disk so the boot manager can get loaded. Then you have to boot XP normally (not inside of vmware) create another hardware profile and set it to manaully prompt for the profile, then boot the 'vmware' profile and change the ide drivers to just plain old IDE so it will boot under vmware, then install vmware tools to update the ide driver.

I've got it booting now. It seems to be completely functional, but I wouldn't know, because I can't get past "registration screen" once I log in. It doesn't seem to have a connection, and the network connection is showing up as an ethernet connection. I normally connect via wifi in linux, is there a way to set that up?

Thats normal because vmware presents virtual hardware back to the guest OS. What you need to do is setup the vmware networking in linux either bridges or nat, then set up the virtual adapter in XP.

hwo do you set up the virtual adaptor in XP? I've got the networking set up as bridged. You mentioned a hardware profile above. Is that related to the networking issue?

You setup the virtual adapter just like you would if the virtual machine was on your network for real. Since it bridged it will have similar settings to the real adapter on your host OS, same subnet, gateway, dns.
The hardware profile is because the hardware looks different under vmware and native, under vmware your going to see the IDE, network, and video that vmware emulates, when booting normally you see the real hardware in the system. XP can't fully autodetect the hardware at boot time so you have to use profile to tell it which IDE driver to use.

I'm sorry, can you explain this to me? I've never set up a profile. The real adaptor get's it's address and stuff from dhcp, so I don't set anything. Or is there a tutorial online for this?