I have a dual-boot PC with 2 physical HHDs, an 80GB running Debian Sarge (master) and a 9GB running Windows XP Professional (slave). The dual-boot runs fine, Grub loads XP without a hitch. However when I set up VMWare to boot Windows straight off the slave drive within Linux, it doesn't get very far before it bluescreens and reboots. Now I *believe* that Windows has issues with booting off a slave drive, raising a couple of questions:

1) Why won't it boot off a slave?? Is there any way to fix this?
2) I have a partition on my master drive (the one with Linux) formatted as FAT32 and shared between operating systems. Am I going to have an issue accessing this partition with Windows if it is already mounted in Linux? (I'm thinking yes, but I'd like confirmation). If so then should I unmount this drive before trying to boot Windows?

...and here's the real kicker
3) If I was to set up VMWare to boot the MASTER drive and select Windows XP at the dual-boot menu, would this give me issues? I understand that VMWare can corrupt file systems if you use it to access file systems that are already mounted, and my /boot directory is already mounted as part of my root partition.

Any input would be appreciated.

My best guess would be that XP was installed on your host system, complete with your host hardware drivers and so on, but when you try to boot it in VMWare, you are using all new (emulated) hardware. Does the XP install boot if you try safe mode instead?