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4 Replies Last post: Jul 19, 2006 5:10 AM by RDPetruska

IDE Hard Drives

Jul 17, 2006 4:43 PM

Click to view ldb88's profile Novice ldb88 4 posts since
Jul 17, 2006
I have VMWare Workstation 5.0.0 and I cannot change my virtual hard drive off of SCSI and onto IDE because there is no IDE option. There is one for the CD-ROM drive, however. How do I change it to IDE? I tried changing the .vmx file, but it said it was created using SCSI geometries and it cannot be used as an IDE. I am willing to create a new virtual machine if necessary.

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ldb88
Re: IDE Hard Drives Jul 17, 2006 11:32 PM
Click to view el1971's profile Expert el1971 997 posts since
May 1, 2006
I've seen that ide->scsi is possible ( http://www.sanbarrow.com/ide2scsi.html )but scsi->ide is more tricky. You should probably create a new ide virtual disk and then clone (with ghost as example) the scsi partition onto it.
For creating a new VM with IDE disks you've to choose custom and after some steps you'll be asked for a virtual disk type. There you can select SCSI or IDE.

-- Edi
Re: IDE Hard Drives Jul 18, 2006 12:20 PM
in response to: el1971
Click to view continuum's profile Guru continuum 11,016 posts since
Dec 18, 2003
Edi
SCSI to IDE is very easy when the disk is larger than 8GB
simply use

ddb.adapterType = "ide"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.geometry.heads = "16"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "16383"

for disk-geometrie.

Don't forget that you need to fix guest-drivers if this is a systemboot-disk.

Ulli
Re: IDE Hard Drives Jul 19, 2006 12:08 AM
Click to view el1971's profile Expert el1971 997 posts since
May 1, 2006
Hi Ulli,

why it has to be greater then 8Gb? Why this limitation?

Thanks a lot for the information,
Edi
Re: IDE Hard Drives Jul 19, 2006 5:10 AM
in response to: el1971
Click to view RDPetruska's profile Guru RDPetruska 15,420 posts since
Jan 11, 2005 Moderator
why it has to be greater then 8Gb? Why this
limitation?
It's not a limitation... it's that the geometry tables change below 8Gb; so you'd need to know the tables and/or formulae. At that point, it's much easier to just create a new disk of the type/size you want and throw away all except the descriptor-file, which will contain the values you will need.
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