Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 17:06:46 -0800 From: Nick Sayer <nsayer@sftw.com> To: freebsd-emulation@freebsd.org Subject: vmware 2.0 raw disk workaround -- plain disks Message-ID: <38E2A8A6.21221B6C@sftw.com>
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I am _THIS_ close to getting my NT partition to boot again under vmware 2.0. Here's what I've done. Instead of using a raw disk setup, I have created a plain disk setup using a FreeBSD raw device as one of the files. Here's how. My IDE disk shows up to fdisk(8) as a 1027c/255h/63s disk. NT is starts at sector 63 and is 4192902 sectors long. I created an 'nt4.hd' plain disk setup file containing this: DRIVETYPE ide CYLINDERS 261 HEADS 255 SECTORS 63 ACCESS "/home/vmware/mbr" 0 63 ACCESS "/dev/rad0s1" 63 4192902 To create "mbr", you dd a 32256 file from /dev/zero (63 sectors), use vnconfig to turn it into a device, then run fdisk on it with -B and -i. Tell it the geometry in the plain disk file. This setup boots and gets me into loading NT before it blue screens because it wants my boot device to be IDE. However.... When I hook this same disk up as the IDE primary master, it just hangs and I never even see the NT boot menu come up. I suspect the guest machine BIOS can't deal with the phony geometry I've set up, and attempting to change the geometry fails miserably. But this concept may be an answer for those of you suddenly unable to boot raw disk partitions under vmware. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-emulation" in the body of the message
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