VMWare - WinXP-Pro guest OS existing installation? [SOLVED]

[johnmc]

I'm using VMWare on Gentoo host OS with a WinXP-Pro guest OS on a virtual disk, and I'd like to try pointing VM Ware at my 2nd HDD that has WinXP-Pro installed natively.

This would let me use the same XP environment whether booting the guest OS or natively, instead of maintaining two XP-Pro installations on the same Linux laptop (which is... perverse ).

I've found the following links at vmware.com that seem thorough enough and answered most of my questions:

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws4/doc/disks_dualmult_ws.html#1046324

and setting up XP hardware profiles

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws4/doc/disks_profiles_ws.html#1046333

I still wonder about accessing the NTFS partition on my second HDD in the XP guest OS, does it use it's own drivers to do this or does it rely on Linux to access the raw partition? Has anyone else out there done this? Please share your experience if you have.

Thanks!

[edit]

You can't do this without the ability to write to the guest partition, which in my case is NTFS.
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[Peacefaker]

I added another disk (old 15GB) /dev/hdd, I tried using it with at sata adapter as /dev/hdg but VMware was not too good at that. Anyhow I set the premissions as 777 for /dev/hdd and gave the VMware WinXP installation raw disk access to that and it works just fine, a bit slow tough took 3 hours to install. I got to have something wrong somewhere but just can't find it.