short: You can run a virtual machine via VMWare using a raw drive on SATA.
long: I have a laptop with a SATA drive. The first partition is NTFS
running corporate windows xp. Later partitions are for gentoo Linux. I
have a dual-boot setup using grub. Inside Linux I run a VMWare virtual
machine which accesses the NTFS raw partition. When I boot the virtual
machine, I see my entire grub menu as if I were booting the computer
itself. I just make sure I choose windows then, although if I
accidentally choose Linux, I simply get an error. In windows I have two
"device profiles" one called "real" and one called "virtual". I choose
virtual when I am running the virtual machine, of course. When I set
this all up, I remember I had to manually hack one of the vmware config
files to make the SATA work. You can find the info in the vmware
forums, I think. The other problem that came up was the windows xp
authorization: it may think you have installed it twice due to the
greatly different device profiles. Once I managed to get around that,
it hasn't bothered me since. Now everything works seamlessly except for
some occasional networking issues.
Hope some of this helps.
Regards,
Jonathan
Dylan Beaudette wrote:
Hi everyone,
recently purchased a new machine for the lab, and have plan on using it for
the following :
two SATA drives, one with WinXP the other with Debian Linux.
Right now it boots into Linux by default, and will provide remote-login
services among other things to our lab members. The Windows XP install was
going to be accessed via VMware, with linux as the host operating system of
course, for people who actually sit down at the machine. I was planning on
accessing the first SATA disk in raw mode as opposed to creating a virtual
disk for windows to live in. however, according to the vmware docs, raw
access mode will not work with SCSI disks. with kernel 2.6 SATA devices
appears as SCSI devices- so it seems that this approach will not work.
one possible work-around would be to dump windows on the first disk, format
with ext3, and create a large VMware virtual disk in its place. This option
should work fine.
one small problem (?) -- my bootloader (grub) is stored in the MBR of the
first SATA disk, will re-partitioning this disk destroy the MBR ? and if so,
how can i safely restore it ?
any comments / thoughts -- I am pretty sure that the above is reasonable, but
I would sure appreciate any other options!
thanks!
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