I have a dual boot IBM Think Centre desktop system. One of the installed systems is OpenSuse 10.3. I have installed VMware-Server and created a WinXP Home VM guest using a virtual disk. That guest runs quite well for my needs.
What I want to create is a guest VM which runs the system installed on the other physical partition. Once I started launching vmware as user "root" I have no problems creating the guest VM pointing to the physical partition. I have specified no snapshots, independent-persistent, and no write caching. The problem is that the guest system starts to boot and then crashes. When I boot the system using dual boot it runs just fine.
I guess is that the problem is caused by the fact that SuSE Linux maps the physical drives as SCSI and not IDE. e.g., /dev/sda1 VS /dev/hda1. Since VMware is passing that configuration on to the guest using the physical partition it is causing it to crash.
This raises two questions. First, does anyone know a way to cause VMware-Server to map the physical partition back to IDE? And, second, does anyone know of a way to cause SuSE Linux to use IDE mapping? I know this is not the best place for the second question.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.