Cant boot from CD

[jasongittens]

Ive spent my whole saturday looking through the forum to find out why my VM will not boot Windows XP Professional from CD. Instead not matter what I do (going into BIOS and changing boot sequence to cdrom) it boots from network AMD (whatever that means). I came across some information regarding setting cdrom to emulation but there wasnt any detail on how to set it.

i have a macbook running OS X 10.4.8

Please help on this issue!

[vincentck]

Thanks for your reply.

VM actually run in full screen mode. But i did change the CDROM to top of the boot sequence. I still cannot have the "boot from CDROM.." prompt and drive me to the netwrok boot.

Any idea?

[RDPetruska]

1. Do you have more than one CD-ROM device on your host (physical or virtual)?

2. Have you verified that the CD-ROM/ISO image you are using is, in fact, bootable?

[KevinG]

ide1:0.fileName = auto detect

Your virtual machine virtual CD-ROM is configured for "Auto Detect"

Select "VM" -> "Settings" -> CD-ROM and configure it to use the physical drive letter of the CD-ROM drive on the host.

[vincentck]

You just like the beacon in the dark!!

The OS installation disk can now be detected after changing drive setting from auto detect to the physical drive letter.

It helps me a lot! Thank you so much.

[KevinG]

Cool

[BigNate]

I'm still hitting this problem; I'm running VMware Server 1.0.3 and I'm trying to make a Win95 VM to use a legacy program. It's a legit original CD (actually I have both Win95 and Win95+USB CDs and both have this problem). I've tried popping the CD in quickly when the VM BIOS starts (this is easy; it's a laptop low-profile CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo). I've done this while putting focus in the VM and hitting escape; selecting the CD-ROM drive does not help. I've changed BIOS settings to search for CD-ROM first to no avail. I have a virtual CD drive as well, but autodetect is not selected. I've tried using legacy CD mode, tried without it, and am now tempted to try cloning the Win95 CD and mounting it on my virtual drive. I've got four vmware logs here, any help is appreciated.

Edit: removed attached logs. —BigNate

[bgertzfield]

Like the other posters said, I believe there are no bootable Windows 95 CDs.

I think you'll need to get a boot floppy image and attach it to your virtual machine.

[BigNate]

Like the other posters said, I believe there are no

bootable Windows 95 CDs.

I think you'll need to get a boot floppy image and

attach it to your virtual machine.

Yeah, good call. It's been so long since I've used fdisk and format to set up a FAT32 partition. Took a while to find a download of a floppy image (as opposed to an exe that wanted to create a floppy), but http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/dos.html had one.

[permlaw]

I have been trying since Beta 4 to boot from an XP CD.I have tried iso image, manually selecting the CD drive, attached a new CD drive, uninstalled and reinstalled fusion,put CD drive at top of boot sequence,.Nothing works.

I am using the same XP CD that I used to make VMs for the first Beta and it worked perfectly.I never had any problem with the first 3 betas.At present I am using beta 4 with an old VM I made on the earlier beta.It works OK BUT I can not install VM tools or more correctly, if I install it the VM disappears.I don't know if this is related to the booting problem.

I am attaching the log file.

Any help would be appreciated.

[eknauft]

Thanks for the logs and detailed description. Can you use the physical CD-ROM drive with any preexisting VMs? That is, is the CD-ROM drive not bootable, or does it just not work at all? Have you tried booting from other bootable CDs?

One more really useful thing that would really help us: could you upload a dump of your ioregistry? To do this, open up a terminal (under Apps/Utilties) and type "ioreg -l > ioregDump.txt". Then upload ioregDump.txt from your home directory.

Thanks!

[eknauft]

I looked at the log file, and it seems you have "Start Connected" unchecked in the VM cdrom settings menu. Could you try checking this box before powering on and seeing if it fixes the problem?

Some more things you can try: Use cdrom0 instead of cdrom1. Try it with the CD in the other drives if you have more than one. Unplug any other external storage (some broken USB storage devices pretend to be CD-ROMs).

Thanks.

[permlaw]

Cd drive works fine in older VMs created using earlier betas.Put the XP disk in and it auto ran and opened right up to the installation menu.I have also tried another XP disk and got the same result .Just won't boot.

I am attaching the iodumptext you requested.Thanks alot for your efforts.

[permlaw]

Have just tried with "Connected "checked in the CD settings and using cdrom(0).No boot.After the DHCP spinning X moves a few dots it says "no DHCP or no DHCP proxy offered"

[permlaw]

BTW the box I checked in the VM CDrom settings is "Connect" and not "Start Connected".Am I in the wrong place?

[eknauft]

"Connected" on fusion automatically sets "Start Connected", so you're fine. Sorry, I was thinking of the UI for Workstation.

Could you try the following:

1) Create a VM you wish to install windows on. Make sure the cdrom drive is connected to cdrom0.

2) Make sure the VM is powered off.

3) Make sure no CD is in either drive on the host.

4) Power on the VM. It will go to the AMD network boot because you don't have a CD in the drive.

5) Insert the install CD into your computers main (internal) drive.

6) Does the CD show up on your desktop? If things are working it should not.

7) Reboot the VM by pressing "ctrl-alt-delete" or chosing "send ctr-alt-delete" from the menu. Do not power off the VM.

😎 The VM should hopefully boot off the CD. If not, try ejecting the CD and putting it in the other drive and rebooting the VM as described in step 7

Hopefully this should let you install VMs and give us more data about where the problem lies. Also, let me know if you ever see the busy color-wheel mouse for more than 5 seconds during this process and when it happened.

Thanks!

[permlaw]

Well-Unfortunately Iam still getting the same result.I followed your instruction.I did not get the CD on the desk top-but the VM will not ibstall from the XP disk.I did not see any difference in the process as a result of first running the VM with nothing in the CD drive.Same process appears on screen with or without disk in CD drive or using CD(0) or CD(1) or auto detect or iso image.

VMs created with Beta 4 will not install from the same XP disk used to create VMs under earlier Betas.

I am attaching the log file.Maybe you can see what exactly is wrong.I appreciate your help a great deal.I have been waiting to preorder since June but am afraid I just wont be able to make any use of it.

Thanks

[eknauft]

Thanks for working with us to figure out the cause of this. Its strange because with the proper BIOS boot order and an cdrom ISO connected at poweron, there isn't much that can go wrong. Maybe it isn't being connected at power on -- the log file does mention that you have the line startConnected = FALSE in your vmx file. Perhaps the configuration editor isn't setting this properly or its left over from an older release.

Why don't you try the following. First, make sure the VM is powered off, the "connected" box is checked in the cdrom settings, and the backend is pointing to the ISO. Then manually edit the VM's .vmx file with a text editor and see if the line "startConneted = FALSE" is present. If so, try deleting it or changing the value to TRUE. Now power on the VM and see if it boots from the CD.

Thanks!

[wester_vm]

I am having the exact same problem on this version. I am trying to load solaris 10 from ISO image and it will not load it, even if i burn it as a dvd. Any help on this? here is my vmware.log

[arpan]

I'm having the same problem as well.

Had the same problem with the previous beta. Today, downloaded RC1, reinstalled Tiger, and installed RC1.

It is not booting from the CD using Windows98 SE, Windows ME, Windows XP.

I'm not sure what's wrong. I'm using a CoreDuo Macbok.

[Pat_Lee]

I'm having the same problem as well.

Had the same problem with the previous beta. Today,

downloaded RC1, reinstalled Tiger, and installed

RC1.

It is not booting from the CD using Windows98 SE,

Windows ME, Windows XP.

I'm not sure what's wrong. I'm using a CoreDuo Macbok.

Have you tried going into the CD/DVD settings and changing it from "Automatically detect physical CD/DVD drive" to "Select physical CD/DVD drive" and select cdrom0?

Pat