On Wed, 17 Mar 2004, Mark Limburg wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> On Wed, 2004-03-17 at 02:17, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
>
> > Looking at the support pages at www.vmware.com, it appears that raw disks
> > are still almost fully supported. The only thing you can't do (couldn't
> > ever do) is boot from a raw disk if it's SCSI. You can have
> > (non-bootable) SCSI raw disks and you can boot from IDE raw disks.
> >
> > Setting it up is a bit tricky ("like pulling your hard disk out and
> > sticking it in another machine"), but it can be done and it does appear to
> > be supported. Plenty of instructions on line at www.vmware.com.
> >
> > Actually, now that I look at it, running XP or Server 2003 from a raw disk
> > is not officially supported. Win 2000 is, though. Also, the instructions
> > say they apply to WinXP as well, although if it breaks you get to keep the
> > pieces. One issue is that XP insists on re-invoking annoying activation
> > scheme every time you change between native boot and VM boot. There
> > doesn't seem to be a workaround unless you have a corporate license. See
> > the VMware newsgroups for more info. Other reports indicate mixed
> > success.
>
> Well, I would prefer not to boot to the raw disk, I want to keep booting
> to the little virtual drive I've already setup. Safer that way, and no
> issue with activation. Although, I'm running the corporate edition of
> XP that has no activation ... (shakes head) ... no, I just want to
> access the 120G XP partition's data and write to that disk if I need to.
>
> I'll so a hunt and see what I can see.
I would guess it's doable without too much trouble then. The big thing to
remember is NEVER, EVER access the raw disk partition directly from the
Linux host when the VMWare guest is running. If you want to share the
disk between host and guest, Samba is the way to go.
--
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
