I LOVE this program and it works like a charm when I create a virtual machine and install WinXP Home onto it, however this isn't much use to me as I have a dual boot with XP and wish to be able to run THAT installation of XP instead of the specialy made XP Home installation.

Is there any way to get an existing XP Home installation to work with VMWare? Or even create a VMWare installation of XP Home and make that bootable so you can run it on its own?

I don't want to have two XP instalations.

What you want is difficult to do because VMware typically creates virtual hardware to run off of. Its difficult to use your actual hardware, because the native OS you are running under is accessing it at the time.

In other words, when you boot into Linux, Linux is accessing your hardware. Then you start up VMware under it and its very problematic to attempt to have 2 OS's accessing the same physical hardware.

hmm imho i dont think using VMWare you can access to the same hardware at the same time...

still as i understand the question, the OP has a partition on his hard drive and he wants to use that instead of the preconfigured one...

I think is doable, at least in Virtual PC ( another similar program ), look for the Virtual Hard Disk Creation Wizard... there is an option there that says something like "Map Existing partition to Virtual Drive" iirc....

regretably i am away from home right now so i cant verify the correct set of steps... but let me know if you found that option in the wizard...

Remeber tho that Windows installs optimized for the hardware you use at the time of instalation ( I Think ) so your OS might show starnge behavior / refuse to boot but all your data will be there and you can reinstall the OS from your own disks afterwards

If you boot an existing installation of XP in VMWare it doesn't see your actual hardware, only the fake VMWare hardware, everytime you boot an existing installation is's like taking the HD out of your computer and booting it in a totaly diferent computer with totaly different hardware. XP doesn't like this, however you can get round this problem by creating different 'hardware profiles' that you choose from a menu at boot. Both hardware profiles are exactly the same at the moment due to the folowing problem.

Now when I start my virtual machine it boots into my LILO boot loader and I can load XP, however my XP installation doesn't like not having any of the hardware it's expecting and after showing the first loading screen I get a BSOD and it reboots.

I don't think there's really going to be a way around this and VMWare doesn't officialy support runing an exisiting installation of XP, but it does Win2000 and 98.

That hardware profile thing is a great idea! Too bad there isn't a way to tell XP which hardware profile to use upon booting...

If you go into the individual hardware profile options there should be a checkbox saying something like "Always use this profile as an option when Windows starts".

You get to set the timeout too.