Howto: Windows in Fedora with Vmware Server on dual boot laptop.

[wneumann]

My Dell laptop is dual boot: Xp professional installed from work, which I rarely use, and my workhorse Fedora 5. One recent evening every TV channel was golf so I decided my recreation would be to put the Xp partition in a Vmware shell and run it in linux. VMware Server is free, and an easy install. Instructions for the rest are on VMware's site. But I hadn't yet found Scott Bronson's article linked below so "the rest" took a bit more work.

I can wake my previously suspended Xp session now in seconds within Linux. Ctl-Alt-Ret gives full screen Xp that feels almost native. Ctrl-Alt returns to your Linux session with Xp in a window. Xp's internet is piggy-backed via NAT on the linux connection and needed no special set-up to work. Xp and Linux share resources via Samba. Everything essential just works.

The excellent article http://news.u32.net/articles/2006/07...ical-partition by Scott Bronson tells you how. It is written for Ubuntu: just read "Grub" for "Lilo". Had I found it when I started I'd have saved much time. Some issues he mentions, like not being able to suspend the virtual machine, are no longer issues in the current VMWare Server.

VMware's own instructions insist that the procedure is "unsupported." I.e., you can trash your disk if you make a mistake. So before you start it is worth stopping to think about what you are doing.

You are creating two computers, A and B, which just happen to reside in one shell. A and B each have their own partitions which happen to live on one drive. If A and B simultaniously access the same partition without communicating, disaster is assured. To avoid disaster, A MUST ask B if A wants to access B's data.

So, before you start, remove anything that directly mounts Linux partitions in Windows or Windows partitions in Linux. You can later set up Linux and Windows to ask each other nicely.

Also, to set up Xp you will boot your machine through your grub menu in VMware. You must avoid accidentally booting Linux at this point, so before you start, disable the timeout line in grub.conf thus:
# timeout=15
Do NOT assume your timeout is big enough to be safe. The phone is sure to ring just as you are trying to click away the information window that popped up over your grub screen.
These warnings are in Scott's article but are worth repeating.

Section by section comments to Scott Bronson's article:
Prepare the disk. Scott tells you how to set things up so you don't need to run vmware as root. I didn't test this. I'm in my /etc/sudoers so I run "sudo vmware".
Prepare Windows I did what he recommends except for 4: removing the preinstalled software specific to your laptop (I didn't have his instructions yet). It caused no problem for me. You can probably ignore it too and do it later if you have problems.
Create the Virtual Machine When Scott says select just your Boot and Windows partitions, do it his way. I followed other instructions to select the whole drive. It apparantly works for some people but it didn't for me. Windows would blue-screen halfway though the boot.
Turn on the Virtual Machine Just do what Scott says. If Windows blue-screens during boot read above and the "Issues" section below.
Set up the Boot Disk One of Scott's readers had a simpler method than Scott's, which I followed. Look for it in the reader comments to Scott's article. You need to copy ntldr, ntdetect.cm and boot.ini from c:/ to a virtual floppy drive. For me, even with hidden files made visible, none of them were visible in c:/. I copied ntldr and ntdetect.com to a: from c:/i386 and I ran bootcfg.exe and used "save-as" to save a copy of boot.ini to a:. This all worked, but in fact the three files are in c:/ after all, I just didn't know Xp well enough to access them there.
The End! Check that your virtual machine boots from the floppy, bypassing grub.

Extras
After doing the install I added a sound card and usb support to my virtual Xp in the vmware console. I disabled my CD (since it is rarely plugged in) and bluetooth (which I don't need in Xp). And I set up sharing with Samba (I've always struggled with Samba installs, but Firewing1's Samba howto had me up and running in minutes).

Final hints.

1. If you have cpu frequency scaling, you might want to disable it while in Xp. You can do this by clicking on the CPU frequency scaling monitor on your gnome panel and selecting highest speed (or just stop the cpuspeed service). It is not big problem if you don't, your virtual Xp can't know the actual cpu speed and assumes it has a fixed speed cpu, so its clock gets a bit messed up, and a few other things slow down when your CPU scales down.

2. For the same reason the speed of transition effects for menus and minimizing windows get messed up. It is best to disable them (right click the desktop and select "Properties" and then go to Appearance -> Effects).

Issues

1. Unresolved issue: When I switch between booting Xp in Vmware and booting Xp straight, MS sees changed hardware and tells me I have to reactivate Windows within 3 days. Reactivation is a 10 to 15 minute toll-free phone call. Microsoft is aware of this issue and apparantly working on it (see discussion to Scott's article). Some people don't have this problem. If you find a sure-fire way to avoid this issue please let me know.

I have disabled Xp altogether in grub.conf so I never boot Xp non-virtual. A hard-core Windows user won't find this satisfactory. I read that Virtual Xp has problem with some games. For me it gives a black screen on googleearth -- big deal, that works in Linux.

2. My virtual Xp initially always bluescreened halfway through boot. I followed the solution here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082 mentioned here http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...e-start-0.html and also changed from using the whole disk for my virtual Xp to using partitions as recommended above. The two together solved the problem. Maybe just one of the two was needed.

3. If I shut down Xp my virus software insists I remove the floppy in a: to avoid the risk of boot sector virus. There is no way to switch this off. If you have this: when VMserver is windowed there is an icon at the bottom where you can disconnect the virtual floppy. It reconnects when you next boot Xp.

The end.

[pparks1]

I read that Virtual Xp has problem with some games

Yes, performance would be absolutely horrific. For almost everything else, VMWare is fantastic.


The only thing I find funny is the premise of the article that explains how touchy VMWare is with regards to it's environment. Here is the quote;

Problem is, it feels like it's perched on the tip of an eggshell. Any change to its environment tends to cause it to fall over, isolating all your data in the VM until you can find the time to get it working again. It's not fun to trust important data to such a brittle environment.

Honestly, I've never had a single problem with VMWare and it's environment. In fact, I have created dozens of VMWare images that I put on our network at work and I have hundreds of developers who take my image files and run them on thier own machines. We move virtual machines around like crazy and RARELY have a single problem.

But the article is cool and is something that I have never done in the past, so I am looking forward to trying it out to see how it works. Thanks for posting.

[diamond]

I'm stuck. When I powered on the virtual machine "GRUB _" appears on my screen and I can't do a thing. I get also the message "you do not have vmware tools installed". So if someone could help me out here it would be really appreciated.

Solved: I saw some other post with problems with grub about the second stage missing and decided to recreate my virtual machine using the entire disk instead of only two partitions.

[felalex]

Hi , I've followed the instructions, installed the vmware server and all, when windows gave me the blue screen with error, I've followed the solution on the microsoft's site, but with no luck.
I have a 80G SATA drive on my lenovo n100 (I thought that that's the reason), there are some words in the arcticle about how to deal with SATA but no real howto , I've tried to find the drivers from windows (hardware manager) , but the drivers listed there were the same as discussed in microsoft's site.
If there's anyone who knows how to fix the problem, please help.