VMWare boot existing WinXP Installation

HuckinFappy · 12-15-2005, 11:02 PM

Greetings...I'm trying to get VMware workstation up and running for the first time. I'm doing this on a machine that is currently set up for Dual boot.

- WinXP on HDA
- Fedora Core 4 on HDB
- GRUB for bootloader on HDA MBR
- Running VMWare Workstation in Fedora, trying to create a WinXO Home Edition virtual machine

So I've followed the instructions for setting up a virtual machine using an existing installation of Windows. Problem is, when I boot, I get the Phoenix BIOS, then a black screen with GRUB in the corner, and it all hangs.

I've found several posts on various vmware newsgroups, USEnet groups, etc related to this, but have not read a solution anywhere yet.

Any help appreciated

~Jeff

acid_kewpie · 12-16-2005, 05:51 PM

well that's a bit of a mess if you want to boot XP.... grub is going to require /boot on /dev/hdb in order to read it's own config file, so you're not going to have any fun with that. it's not a great idea to spread your bootloaders across multiple devices... as you're finding out. instead i'd suggest swapping the devices around, and reinstalling grub on the linux drive, and restoring the standard XP boot sector on that drive. that way you can boot to both os's normally via grub on boot, but by only providing the XP drive with an XP MBR you'll just boot XP. you will of course need to be a little careful about swapping the devices over, you'll need to replace any /dev/hdbX entries in /etc/fstab with the hda but then FC4 will probably not refer to any of these, instead using labels for the filesystems. you'll also need to modify the grub.conf file to boot to hd(0,0) instead of hd(1,0) etc... You might also have issues booting XP via grub that way as windows in an arse and likes to be primary master. as such you dcanuse the map-drive commands in grub.conf to pretend the devices are the other way around in the bios when booting XP via grub.

ic_torres · 10-16-2007, 04:10 AM

hi can i install winxp in vmware with slack 12.0 as the host?

acid_kewpie · 10-16-2007, 06:06 AM

please don't drag up old threads... you've 210 posts, why dig up a thread that's nearly 2 years old now? please start a new thread for a new question

ic_torres · 10-16-2007, 05:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by acid_kewpie

please don't drag up old threads... you've 210 posts, why dig up a thread that's nearly 2 years old now? please start a new thread for a new question

I am just searching for similar question because i dont want to repeat the same question that has been solved already.

acid_kewpie · 10-17-2007, 01:40 AM

if it was the same question, then the same answer would apply, so no need to reply at all. but it's clearly not the same question anyway, which makes even less sense.

ic_torres · 10-17-2007, 03:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by acid_kewpie

if it was the same question, then the same answer would apply, so no need to reply at all. but it's clearly not the same question anyway, which makes even less sense.

dont worry i really created a new post :

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...k-12.0-592167/

there you go.