VMware and physical drives (was Re: Sharing files between Ubuntu 6.06 and Windows XP)

[Eric Dunbar]

On 04/02/07, Eric Dunbar <eric.dunbar at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 04/02/07, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> > Eric Dunbar wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > Or, as I discovered this evening, you can map a drive or a partition
> > > to your VM and avoid messing with Samba (need to be running vmware as
> > > root, however).
> >
> > How?  I googled some pages that said you could, but I couldn't figure it
> > out.
>
> Edit the preferences for your VM (assuming you're using Server).
>
> You can "Add" another hard drive -- you may have to go to the advanced
> tab when you're adding an HD. You can then choose whether to add a
> single partition or the whole drive to the VM.
>
> In the VM you then mount the drive as you normally would.
>
> Caveat: people have warned that mounting the drive is "experimental"
> but another individual reported that he'd been using it for a while
> without problems. YMMV.

Oh, yeah, you have to be running vmware as root to do this. I don't
like that idea and I'm sure there's a 'better' way to do it but I
don't have the luxury of time (as you can no doubt tell I'm
procrastinating now ;-).

> Anyway, I'm now learning what MBR and GRUB stand for (I come from the
> PPC world where you only ever have to deal with yaboot and it's
> generally impossible to render your machine unbootable). I managed to
> hose my MBR (I think) by telling my Windows XP CD to 'fixmbr' and now
> doing the "GRUB dance" with the live Cd to no avail (e.g.
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows).
> Will try a few more things with the Win XP CD before I try to see what
> installing Linux and/or Windows XP onto the blank partition will do...

Well, I managed to get my Linux back by using grub-install and
over-writing the windows boot loader but this means I've now lost the
windows partition that I just installed. Now to figure out what "boot"
means (a * in fdisk) and now I can get my external Windows XP disk
back to being recognised by GRUB (I don't care whether I recover this
particular installation but I do want to know HOW to do so so that I
can avoid running into the same headaches later when the system is
active as the server).