VMWare running native XP on SATA disk, part 2

Posted on November 18th, 2007 by Yousef Ourabi

Last week I started writing the introductory article: “VMWare running native XP on SATA disk” — I promised to have the follow up the next day. It has been more than week. What can I say, busy week at work.

We left of having configuring the Windows side of the equation, having set up a separate hardware profile and installed the VMware SCSI drivers. All we have left to do is create a virtual machine that reads the already installed Windows XP, which is for the most part a simple process. There is are a few places that can be time sinks, so I’ve included screen shots and a step-by-step walk through to save you time.

I will not cover installing VMware workstation or server, has how you choose to do so depends on your system and what you want. I’ll leave that up to you.

To begin, make sure the user that will be running vmware is in the “disk” group (on my Ubuntu system) — which allows the user access to the raw disk.

I am using VMware workstation so these screen shots are geared towards that, but are mostly relevant to VMware server.

1) Fire up VMware — you should see something like the Screen Shot Below — A standard VMWare splash screen

VMware workstation splash screen

2) Start the process of creating a new virtual machine, either by going to File->New or right clicking inside the inventory pane (the far left pane). The key thing here is to select a “Custom” virtual machine, instead of the “Typical” virtual machine.

VMWare new virtual machine

3) The Guest operating system to select is obviously Windows XP — I have not tried this out with Vista yet, but it should probably work.

4) Give your new Virtual Machine a name and configure where the configuration files will be stored on disk.

5) Select the number of processors you want to allocate to this virtual machine.

6) Configure the amount of RAM you want allocated to this virtual machine.

7) Configure the networking, I selected “bridged networking” which means the virtual machine gets its own IP, instead of using the Hosts via NAT.

8 ) Select the I/O Adapter type — this is critical, make sure to select the “Buslogic” option, which should be selected by default.

VMWare SCSI Adapter

9) Next you will be prompted to “Select a Disk” — you obviously want to choose “Use a physical disk” (this is the premise of this article after all?)

VMware Disk Selection

10) You will then be prompted to configure which physical disk you want to use. I used /dev/sda, and that should be enough for you, the only time this becomes a problem is when you have your linux boot partition on another disk, but GRUB installed on the MBR of the first disk. In that case after the wizard is complete, simply had a second physical device to the virtual machine and you should be set.

VMWare physical disk detection

11) Finish!

Have fun with your new Windows partition running under linux. This setup has allowed me the flexibility of booting into my favorite operating system most of the time, and only requiring a reboot when I need to use “Hardware Intensive” applications (Read: games).

Cheers!

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Filed under: Linux, Virtualization


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17 Responses to “VMWare running native XP on SATA disk, part 2”

  1. VMWare running native XP on SATA disk | Yousef Ourabi, on November 18th, 2007 at 4:40 am Said:

    [...] We left of having configuring the Windows side of the equation, having set up a separate hardware profile and installed the VMware SCSI drivers [...]

  2. Big, on November 24th, 2007 at 6:10 am Said:

    Thanx for the article! I was waiting for the second part :) I though it would be more complicated, but quite simple!

    What do you about XP activation? Will this break to already activated XP installation?

  3. Pak, on December 8th, 2007 at 5:19 pm Said:

    Great guide!! thanks :)

    only 2 questions:

    1- what about winXP activation? It will continue to prompt me to activate it every time I switch between XP VM and XP physical?

    2- I have virtualizated MBR too… what will happen if I’ll make start the Linux VM inside the Linux physical?

    greetings

  4. yourabi, on December 8th, 2007 at 8:20 pm Said:

    Big, and Pak: Activation is a bit of a tricky point . If you can through work or school, or some other *legal* way, use an enterprise edition cd.

    Pax: If I understand and you are asking what will happen if you accidentally boot into the linux partition you are currently running — bad things will happen — mostly with the potential to corrupt your filesystem. I would stop the VM right away.

    Hope this helps.
    Yousef

  5. Pak, on December 10th, 2007 at 4:35 pm Said:

    thanks for the answer

    1- I have OEM winXP… it ask me to activate both VM and physical.. I’d like to solve it in “legal” way… otherwise I’ll look for turnaround…

    2- do you know if there are some way to make bootable only the win partition, without including GRUB in virtualizated machine too? Using the partition (sda1) instead the full disk (sda) don’t work…

    thanks again

    Pak

  6. yourabi, on December 21st, 2007 at 5:54 am Said:

    Pak,

    1) Unfortunately OEM installs see this as two different computers.

    2) You can create a boot-floppy image that boots straight into XP and then configure vmware to boot from this first and then the virtual disk 2nd.

  7. badsez, on December 30th, 2007 at 10:40 pm Said:

    when i tried to setup and boot XP from Vista, i got an error message
    Operation on file “\\.\PhysicalDrive0″ failed.

    can you help me please.
    ref: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/119210?tstart=0

  8. Bob Burroughs, on January 14th, 2008 at 10:22 pm Said:

    Hi,

    VMware Workstation costs $189! So I tried to use
    Applications->System Tools->VMware Server Console.
    The screens are almost identical, except on the last
    screen–the one where you click Finish.

    There’s a text box for the name of a ‘disk file’. It’s
    primed with .vmdk.

    What’s a .vmdk file?

  9. Roger, on March 3rd, 2008 at 7:34 pm Said:

    To-notch! Your instructions in Part One regarding the scsi drivers did the trick.

    Much appreciated!

  10. Sid, on August 14th, 2008 at 6:01 pm Said:

    I’ve been kicking this one around for a while.

    I’ve installed the SCSI drivers in step 1 and when I start my VM I get a Grub Error 21. I’m assuming it can’t find my /dev/sdb and is erroring out.

    Any way to boot to the first SATA disk (/dev/sda) if that’s where my grub is installed?

    Thanks,
    sid.

  11. Sid, on September 5th, 2008 at 12:57 pm Said:

    I solved the issue (sort of) by downloading supergrub and leaving a bootable CD in my DVD drive. Sort of a stop gap and I’m not really happy about it, but it allows me to boot to my native XP which is where most of my crap was anyway and allows me to reboot into XP if I’m gaming or doing something that just doesn’t work well in a VM.

    Thanks Yousef,
    sid.

  12. Simon Ewins, on September 16th, 2008 at 11:02 pm Said:

    Fantastic tutorial. I completed all steps and everything was very clear. I got to the click ‘Finish”, no issues. However when I then clicked ‘Close” I keep getting this error.

    Error opening virtual machine “/home/simon/vmware/XP/XP.vmx”: The configuration file for this virtual machine cannot be found. It might be missing from the virtual machine directory, or the path specified to access this virtual machine might be incorrect.

    When I look in the vmware directory there is nothing, no XP sub-directory and no files.

    I don’t think I have missed any steps. Everything felt perfect but no luck. Do you have any suggestions that can solve this (or even explain it) for me?

    Thanks much, in advance,
    Simon

  13. bill, on September 22nd, 2008 at 5:25 pm Said:

    excellent guide. I’m running 64-bit XP and the Windows hardware installation wizard informs me that “the specified location does not contain a compatible software driver…” and it further admonishes me to “…make sure it is designed to work with Windows for x64 systems.” The VMWare site seems only to direct the user to the driver referenced in this article.

    anyone else have this problem?

  14. loligo, on October 20th, 2008 at 10:11 pm Said:

    Thank you very much!

    About “2- do you know if there are some way to make bootable only the win partition, without including GRUB in virtualizated machine too? Using the partition (sda1) instead the full disk (sda) don’t work…”:

    You can simply rewrite the MBR. In fact VMWare had alreay generated a virtual MBR named your-disk-name-br.vmdk. So you can use tools to rewrite the MBR, such as ‘fixmbr’ and ‘fixboot’.

  15. Yousef Ourabi, on October 22nd, 2008 at 5:15 am Said:

    I”ve never experimented with that, but I believe you could also create a bootable floopy with the Windows bootloader and put that first in the boot-device priority via the VMWare bios…

    Just a thought.

  16. nino, on October 24th, 2008 at 10:39 am Said:

    Excellent guide tho ive notived having vmware tools installed under windows slows the login down really badly

  17. Kevin, on October 31st, 2008 at 3:10 am Said:

    Does anyone have a solution for XP-64? The VMware SCSI driver does not work with it.

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