I have a dual-boot system with XP home edition and gentoo 1.4. My bootloader is grub. I want to use Vmware 4 with gentoo as the host and XP as the guest OS. On my system I have the following partitions (using grub notation):

(hd0,0) Dell diagnostics (FAT16)
(hd0,1) XP Home edition (NTFS)
(hd0,4) /boot partition (ext2)
(hd0,5) swap
(hd0,6) my root partition (reiserfs)

I've configured vmware to use the existing XP installation (hd0,1) as the guest OS.
When starting the vm the bios runs successfully but grub fails with Error 17.
What am I missing?

My grub.conf:

timeout 30
default 0
fallback 1
splashimage=(hd0,4)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title Gentoo
root (hd0,4)
kernel (hd0,4)/boot/bzImage root=/dev/hda7

title Windows boot menu
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

i don't follow... why are you going through grub in the first place?i'm pretty sure you just choose the partition to boot directly in vmware.

The partition I'm booting XP from (hd0,1).
Grub is installed on the MBR, and grub root is (hd0,4).
Still grub starts and fails when I start the VM.
I wasn't what I expected but I don't understand
the boot architectures involved enough to be that surprised.

I suppose a work-around would be to install grub somewhere else and use the NT bootloader. I'd prefer to make this config work though.

I had a similar problem yesterday and worked it out. Error 17 in grub means that it is unable to mount a partition. This resulted because I had given VMWare access to my raw windows partition, but had not given it access to /boot

Add the /boot partition to the list that VMWare can read and try again. I'm not sure if it need read/write on /boot. Maybe if you use savedefault in grub...

--Ian