Void's Forums

SuSE 10 came with the xen kernel and such, although i havent gotten it working properly. And i have to use vmware to program in C# for school right now (we dont get to java until next semester and on).

Well you aren't going to use Xen to run Windows right now anyhow. I don't think that's ready for prime time. Xen is more for running multiple instances of Linux and/or BSD at the moment. You definitely can boot a Windows installation that is installed to a hard disk partition in VMware though. I know because I do it on the Laptop I am using to type this now. It originally was a Windows machine that I shrunk the NTFS partition down and created a new Linux partition where I installed Linux with a GRUB boot menu that will boot either. When booted in Linux I can bring up VMware and boot the whole disk which brings up the normal GRUB menu where I select Windows. That way I can have both OSs running at the same time (on the rare ocassion I need to boot Windows to test something security related). I just created a second hardware profile in Windows for VMware.

I still havent succeded in having it boot a partition, grub gives me an error 17 (which is : Cannot mount selected partition
This error is returned if the partition requested exists, but the filesystem type cannot be recognized by GRUB. )

I'm sort of guessing that it's referring to my /boot (which is the same partition as '/')?

Any idea to sort this out? I could try making my /boot a separate partition at the very end of the drive.

Normally you want /boot at the biginning of the drive, or close to it. My /boot is on a separate partition and the VMware docs say you should not have a partition mounted by both host and guest so it would be best to put it on a separate partition. Also, this is only supported on an IDE drive. If you are using SCSI it will not work. Read over these to make sure there isn't something else causing your problem:

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/w ... linux.html
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/w ... lboot.html

Did you select "Use entire disk" when you selected the physical disk for your VMware disk?

Void Main wrote:Did you select "Use entire disk" when you selected the physical disk for your VMware disk?

.... I did now

Although now I get a windows error of some kind. Probably hardware related so I will try removing stuff from my virtual machine hardware profile.

Let me just warn you again though when using entire disk. Do NOT, I repeat, NOT boot your Linux installation in the VMware session or you might lose your disk. At minimum you'll be doing a good fsck on it.