It's working!!

Hi Uli,

I finally managed to get the damn thing to work. It was somewhat different from your solution, so I give you all the steps I took.

1. I had more luck with creating a custom workstation which uses raw disk. The setup routine asks you to use either BusLogic or LsiLogic. It doesn't matter which one to choose; you have to change it anyways. So I chose BusLogic.

2. I then modified the .vmx file. I changed the following line:
scsi0.present = "TRUE"
to
scsi0.present = "FALSE"
as you suggested.

3. Now I have two SCSI disks, scsi0:0 and scsi0:1. I renamed them to ide0:0 and ide0:1, respectively. I then got rid of all other instances of scsi0.*.

4. For each hard disk, there is a corresponding .vmdk file. The .vmdk file has a "ddb.adapterType". I replaced the value from "BusLogic" to "ide".

Windows came up on the first try like a charm.

Having said that, the VMware configuration scheme is kind of lame. For raw disks, it gives you the choice of either BusLogic or LsiLogic drivers which are SCSI (as far as I can gather). These drivers have some inter-operability problems with an IDE driver and that makes you wonder what is going wrong. The whole thing could have been avoided had VMware had a radio button for "ide" in the configuration routine.

Nonetheless, I'm happy it works. Thanks for your help.

Cheers,
Nader