Re: [opensuse] SuSE 10.3 and running installed WinXP virtual

Quoting Carlos E. R. <robin.listas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
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On Wednesday, 2009-02-18 at 15:36 -0600, Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:

I'm trying to avoid booting into Windows XP for several reasons, but need
to
run TurboTax and Internet Explorer. TurboTax will not run in
Wine/Crossover
Office. So far I've tried VMware Server 2, doesn't support setup of raw
disks
(i.e. actual partitions, not virtual disks, a file on the host
filesystem),
though may be able to run legacy setups. And VMware Server 1.0.8 sets up
okay but won't boot. Somewhere I ran across a note that it cannot boot
from
SCSI raw disks, only IDE ones. And since some kernel update, even ATA
disks
appear to be SCSI disks (the /dev/hdX => /dev/sdX change). Booting the
virtual machine shows the BIOS screen, then GRUB, then nothing: no
activity,
no prompt, no echoing the keyboard. Why a Windows partition should
display
part of the GRUB console is beyond me.

I think it tries to boot the disk, not the partition. And the disk is
probably set to boot your computer via grub (which is, normally, already
booted as the host system). I read something about this in the vmware
documentation, you can not tell it to boot the virtual machine from the
partition only.


I remember all kinds of permission problems and trying something similar
(access to Windows partition only) several years ago with VMware on a
different computer. I may have reached the same conclusion, the VM needs
access to the whole disk. It makes me real nervous.

With just the partition, VirtualBox behaves very similar to VMware, just GRUB
and the virtual machine becomes unresponsive to the keyboard. I think there
is a one or two character difference.

So I tried using the whole disk with VirtualBox. The GRUB boot screen shows
up, I can downarrow to the Windows line. On hitting ENTER, I see the GRUB
commands:

rootnoverify (hd0,6)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1

Then the error message:

A disk read error occurred.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

A couple of things occur to me. The GRUB menu was set up back in the day when
the hard disk was /dev/hda, now it is /dev/sda. Do I need to change the GRUB
settings? And is there any docs on how to discover disks, partitions,
etc. from GRUB within VirtualBox.

TIA,
Jeffrey
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