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

[Ouattara Oumar Aziz]

Eric Dunbar a écrit :
> 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).
> 

I am not sure you've lost your windows installation. You just have to 
add an entry to grub config file (/boot/grub/menu.lst) after checking 
the ID of your windows partition. On my disk :

~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disque /dev/hda: 81.9 Go, 81964302336 octets
255 têtes, 63 secteurs/piste, 9964 cylindres
Unités = cylindres de 16065 * 512 = 8225280 octets

Périphérique Amorce    Début         Fin      Blocs    Id  Système
/dev/hda1   *           1        1275    10241406    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            1276        9964    69794392+   f  W95 Etendu (LBA)
/dev/hda5            1276        1337      497983+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda6            1338        2283     7598713+  83  Linux
/dev/hda7            2284        3032     6016311   83  Linux
/dev/hda8            3033        9964    55681258+   b  W95 FAT32


My windows is on /dev/hda1 so my grub config file has

# Windows on /dev/hda1
title           Microsoft Windows XP Professionnel
root            (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader     +1

NOTE : In grub config file, the ID of disks start on 0 (for the first 
partition)

The recommended use of grub is to create a /boot partition on which 
you'll install grub. You'll avoid a lot of headache if you do so.