[HOWTO] VMWare Workstation raw disk with WinXP guest

m00nxaild · n00b Joined: 22 Dec 2004 Posts: 8

Hi, thanks for your fast answer.

I'm using "ImPS/2" mouse and /dev/input/mice in xorg.conf
for the keyboard I'm using "kbd" and "pc105".
In vmware, the mouse is set do "default", but I also tried PS/2... and /dev/input/mice, with no success.

In win I made a copy of my profile, and I didn't uninstalled the mouse & keyboard drivers, because in the VMWare's site it said that uninstalling drivers is only necessary for NT.
Anyway, I just uninstalled them right now, booted winxp from within vmware, and still no luck :cry:

oh, i haven't said, but I also tried booting in safe mode from within vmware, still no mouse nor keybd.

Any ideas?
Thank you very much

P.S: my mouse is usb (and there is also a touchpad, which also doesn't work)

sdpeterson · n00b Joined: 21 Mar 2005 Posts: 10

When attempting to boot windows from a physical disk in a virtual machine I get a "NTLDR is missing" error. This error occurs after selecting Windows XP from the GRUB menu. I have searched the VMWare forums and found several people with the same issue. I'm curious how posters to this thread have circumvented this error (or if they've even encountered it). My hard drive is partitioned as follows:

hda1 - FAT32 Windows
hda2 - boot
hda3 - swap
hda4 - Linux

I encountered this error while following the outline presented by 10drill. Any help is appreciated.

-Sean

amiatrome · Posted: Mon Mar 21, 2005 5:28 pm Post subject:

I loaded vmware with a boot disk image to bypass the NTLDR error.

My disk image is on another box right now and I cant find the original site I downloaded it from. But hey, there's always google.

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xef · Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2005 3:13 pm Post subject:

I followed this howto and nowi have my vmware working, and it's great! I also managed to get my wireless to get my wireless card to work in linux the last weekend, now i almost never need to reboot on windows!

Just had a problem in the guest windows, sometimes the menu characters disappeared, but disabling the graphic card aceleration solved the problem.

MaxDamage · Posted: Wed May 04, 2005 8:48 pm Post subject:

This page could be of interest when playing with vmware and window$:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082/
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lucidthoughts · n00b Joined: 13 Aug 2003 Posts: 25

hello,
upon trying this method which is very appealing to me,
once i try booting, i get a grub error 18 and it halts at that.

i am using a sata drive.

my grub.conf is:

onlymrme · n00b Joined: 10 May 2005 Posts: 1

I've managed to get Native XP booting inside my Gentoo box as well, mostly using advice from this thread.

I have copied (renamed) ntosknl.exe and hal.dll files from a true Vmware install of XP into the system32 directory of my native install, and use the /KERNEL and /HAL flags in the boot.ini in order to specify which files to use. It seems to work though.

One major gotcha for me:

Ran into an activation problem. When I booted into Vmware, I got a "Do you want to activate XP" dialog. When I clicked "yes", I was told that XP was already activated and was thrown back to the login screen. There is no way to change your key under SP1. Really. There isn't. I re-installed XP with our corporate key, instead of the one with the laptop, and it works now.

So in order to boot Windows now, I have 3 menus:

1. Grub asking XP or Linux
2. Windows boot.ini asking VMware or native kernel/hal
3. Windows asking VMware or native hardware profile

Still it works now, so I'm happy!

Cheers

MaxDamage · Posted: Tue May 10, 2005 7:23 pm Post subject:

tecknojunky · Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 12:25 am Post subject:

anyone managed to run vmware as a normal user and access raw disks? It seems adding yourself to the disk group is insuficient

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dwardo · n00b Joined: 10 Nov 2004 Posts: 55 Location: France

Hi all

If you've followed this topic from the start you will remember that I had Vmware up and running from my raw disks on a multiboot install...

Since then my hard Drive decided to die on me.

So I bought a new Hard Drive (160Go vs 80Go for the dead one) reinstalled Windows and Gentoo and Thought I would have Vmware running quickly since with this threads help the previous instalation had been a breeze...

Well when I start Vmware, I get the grub menu, I select my Windows XP entry and then Vmware just hangs leaving this message on the screen:

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

This is, as you've obviously recognized it, the Windows part of my grub.conf file... The Windows partition is hda1 of course...
I get no error messages or blue screens...

Windows does boot without problem on the hardware (i.e. physicaly)

My Gentoo is the exact same as before (Yeah I had backups....) so I doubt its disk acces or whatever else gentoo configuration problems...

I have the same problem i f Igive the entire disk to vmware or just the boot and windows partiitions.

So If anyone has had this problem or has a remark or possible solution thanks for your :idea:

lostboy1 · n00b Joined: 03 Sep 2003 Posts: 12 Location: Chicago, IL

2aet21sc · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 8

Hi everybody!

I have set up a second hardware profile, copied the drivers from vmware to /system32/drivers, applied the microsoft reg-patch and the one that ichief offered, but still the same error... (STOP 0x0000007B)

What did i miss???

greets

2aet21sc · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 8

Sorry, forgot to say that i have a S-ATA disk...

Pleeeaaase Help!

dwardo · n00b Joined: 10 Nov 2004 Posts: 55 Location: France

I've solved my problem so I hope this will help others...

I was looking for CHS disk geometry problems as this comes up often...

My disk was a Maxtor 160 Gig with LBA=320173056 on /dev/hda
so translated in CHS:

On booting the disk was recognized as: 19929/255/63 but that failed and sfdisk said that my partition did not end on cylinder boundaries
by the way 19929*255*63=320159385 which is not right given my lba...

317632/16/63 is a perfect fit for 320173056
i added hda=317632,16,63 to grub boot command
still a no go... This time I gt a "Corrupt processor error..." something like that

Finaly since sfdisk was still complaining about my partitions not ending on cylinder boundaries I tested my partitions with testdisk...

>> testdisk /list
TestDisk 5.9-WIP, Data Recovery Utility, August 2005
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
Please wait...
Disk /dev/hda - CHS 317632 16 63 - 156334 MB, sector size=512
Disk /dev/hdc - CHS 22 255 63 - 688 MB, sector size=2048
Disk /dev/hdd - CHS 20 255 63 - 624 MB, sector size=2048

Disk /dev/hda - CHS 317632 16 63 - 156334 MB
Partition Start End Size in sectors
check_NTFS: Incorrect number of heads/cylinder 240 (NTFS) != 16 (HD) <---- This line was of interest
1 * HPFS - NTFS 0 1 1 19395 14 63 19551042 [XP Pro]
check_NTFS: Incorrect number of heads/cylinder 240 (NTFS) != 16 (HD)
2 P HPFS - NTFS 19395 15 1 38791 13 63 19551105 [DATA]
[SNIP...]

So next i tried : hda=21175,240,63
And there was light... vmware booted windows and sfdisk quit complaining abou my partitions...
21175*240*63=320166000 < 320173056 so I'm loosing some disk space

So now it works but I think I also know why my CHS was F*** Up from the start...

The disk was /dev/hdb when I partitioned it and did the install on it...
I've found on the web that some people with 2 exact same disks on /dev/hda and /dev/hdb do not have the same geometry detected by linux on boot...
hda had H=255 and hdb had H=240... This sems to be exactly what happened to me...

as hdb 240 and once all was installed on the disk i moved it to hda where upon boot it was detected as 255 --> hence my problems...

So next time I buy a disk and partition it I will look at lba value on it then add the appropriate grub command so as to pass the correct geometry on boot...
Wrong geometr detection seems to be a known yet uncorrected bug in the 2.6 kernels...

Hope this helps others...

2aet21sc · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2005 Posts: 8

I got over my problem (bluescreen STOP) too

The problem was, that linux said that my sata disks are scsi interface disks while windows took them as ide... So changing "lsilogic" or "buslogic" in the .vmdk file to "ide" solved the problem.

So now i can boot windows without bluescreen, but when the windows loginscreen finally loads up, i have no keyboard or mouse.

I have made a second hardware profile, but even if i delete the original drivers in the vmware-hardware profile in native windows i can't do anything...

How can this be?

fuge · Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2005 12:59 pm Post subject:

I've done step nr.2 but I've still got error 17

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infiniteedge · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Mar 2004 Posts: 149

I'm trying to follow everything that's going on in this thread and I'm not doing a good job. I have a pre-existing Windows installation on a separate hard drive that I would like to boot into using Gentoo. Gentoo is installed on /dev/sda 1 2 and 3 and Windows is installed on /dev/sdb1. I configured VMware in Gentoo to have a virtual machine with /dev/sdb as SCSI 0:1 and no other hard drives. I booted natively into the Windows install, copied my current hardware profile, booted into the copy, and added the drivers and registry info in the microsoft support article linked to in this thread. I then also added the registry entry and driver for the vmware scsi driver. I then returned to Gentoo to boot a virtual machine of the physical windows install. Windows began booting normally, prompted me to select a hardware profile (of which I chose the one I modified), and then promptly gave a blue screen and STOP message.

I'm guessing I need further modifications to my vmware hardware profile in Windows, but I don't know what they are. Also, people are talking about the windows kernel and HAL... is all that going to be neccessary for me?

One last note, both the Gentoo hard drive and the Windows hard drive are actually SATA drives installed on a VIA SATA RAID controller (in a non-raid configuration).

Thanks!

korban · Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 10:49 pm Post subject:

this worked for me:
http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=292002

kilianh · Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2005 9:27 am Post subject: XP Home SP1 Activation

golgo13 · Apprentice Joined: 24 Nov 2004 Posts: 158

Am I missing something? For a Windows XP guest you just make a second hardware profile and that's it right? Did I miss something.
As root if I try booting the Raw disk image with Grub I'm not able to use my keyboard so I made Windows XP the default. Before anything happens I get the message

kilianh · Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2005 1:05 pm Post subject:

golgo13,

Sounds like an XP IDE driver problem. The IDE controller that XP sees in the VM is different from the real one when you boot it up natively, and it bombs out. XP is incredibly dumb in that regard (we knew that :wink:

), all other changed devices it reconfigures automatically.

You gotta boot natively into that new "VM" hw profile, go to the hardware manager, select the IDE controller and "update" the driver to use a standard ide dual channel one instead (select it manually if you need to). Save your settings and then boot into the vm profile in vmware, the problem should go away. Let me know if this works for you.

I'd also recommend reading everything in http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_disk_dualboot.html if you get stuck.

golgo13 · Apprentice Joined: 24 Nov 2004 Posts: 158

Hmm, I got past my original problem. Then I ran into the blue screen of death posted here earlier. It seems that with the patch and the change in IDE drivers I've managed to get past the BSOD, but now I'm stuck at the Windows XP startup screen. It's been about an hour now. The mouse is responsive and once in a while I see either CD-ROM or hard disk activity. I'm thinking it's frozen there but it's hard to tell. Anyone else run into this?
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Waninkoko · Guru Joined: 13 May 2005 Posts: 549

Edited: Well, now I get 0x0000007B error. I think I can resolve it

Edited 2: I can't resolve 0x0000007B error. I have changed IDE driver and installed registry patch but nothing

I have a problem

When I installed Windows XP in my SATA drive I had to use the SATA driver that comes in a floppy. Well, the problem is when I'm going to boot Windows under VMware. Appears the BSOD and the error that shows is relationed with file "SiWinAcc.sys", the SATA driver.

I have created a new hardware profile but I don't know how to say to Windows that it doesn't have to load the driver.

The SATA device is configured to appear as an IDE device in VMware.

Silicon Image SiI3112

Any ideas?

urcindalo · Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2005 5:03 pm Post subject:

golgo13 · Apprentice Joined: 24 Nov 2004 Posts: 158

sdpeterson, I'm betting all four of your partitions are primary partitions. I think Windows XP hates anything more than 3. Try making an extended partition with logical partitions beneath it if you need more than 3
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