Can VMWare use an already installed Windows

On Wed, 22 Jun 2005 01:42:00 -0700, Koppe74

Some Caveats: I am not using Windows XP. I am not a VMWare expert.

I see the post by Andre Kostur and I agree with that. XP's product activation may come into play because the virtual machine's hardware may be too different than the actual hardware.

That said, I have been able to boot Windows 2000 independantly from its own parbreastion or from VMWare. The key to avoiding the blue screen, "inaccessable boot device" is to have actual hardware which matches your VMWare settings. The things I have found to be critical are as follows:

1. A single physical CPU on motherboard (but see note below). VMWare gives a virtual machine a single virtual processor. If you have setup Windows 2000 to boot using a SMP HAL, then it will blue screen under VMWare. You might find a trick here to get around this problem: www.jsiinc.com

2. A matching boot controller. The default VMWare controller is compatible with Intel 440xx ide controllers. If you have that controller family, then you can boot. VMWare also has SCSI controllers which you could try to match with your system.

Extra Notes: VMWare benefits from multiple CPUs. This makes sense because the host and guests may place extra demand on the system. I have one dual P3 1.0G motherboard running linux with a SMP kernel and hosting the VMWare application (which can host guest OSs) and that has very good performance (YMMV).

I decided to setup the W2k guest OS in its own parbreastion on this machine even though it won't boot independantly (due to the incompatible HAL) for the following reasons:

1. Straightforward encapsulation of the virtual machine in its own parbreastion(s). This means other Windows tools and methods will work consistently- the same as on other non-vmware W2k machines. 2. Windows can manage its own swap space on its own parbreaston (pagefile.sys) 3. Just for fun.

BTW, if you have a "sysprep" image, you can simply restore that instead of running W2k setup from scratch. Sysprep will prompt for your license key; make sure your licenses are properly in order and that you are in full compliance with your end user license agreement. XP's EULA may be different than W2k's.

Here is a reference page about sysprep:

One extra note:

I found the "ntfs for linux" project's utility programs very useful for backing up and restoring ntfs parbreastions, especially ntfsclone and ntfsresize.

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