Help: Can't seem to get VMWare to boot from a two parition drive

[totalslacker]

Hello,

I seem to have created an issue for myself with my windows install on a new Mac Pro. Given I needed access to both XP and Vista I installed each on their own partition on a second hard drive (MBR format). XP is in the first partition and Vista in the second. Both work fine with bootcamp.

I am able to get the XP partition to boot without issues. I cannot get Vista to boot (which unfortunately is where I need to do almost all of my Windows work right now). Basically at boot I get the Vista bootloader. If I choose vista it fails right away saying it couldn't find necessary files and to run a vista repair install. If I choose XP it works fine.

I have tried various things, the latest being using vmware-rawdiskCreator to create two hard drives for the virtual machine, here ide0 matches the XP partition and ide1 the Vista. vmware-rawdiskCreator tells me the following on this drive:

Nr Start Size Type Id Sytem

-- -

---

-

---

-

---

-- -

---

1 63 409593177 BIOS 7 HPFS/NTFS

2 409593856 567177216 BIOS 7 HPFS/NTFS

From this I set the XP vmdk to be:

1. Disk DescriptorFile

version=1

CID=edb952d4

parentCID=ffffffff

createType="partitionedDevice"

1. Extent description

RW 63 FLAT "XP-pt.vmdk" 0

RW 409593177 FLAT "/dev/disk1s1" 0

RW 616 ZERO

RW 567177216 ZERO

RW 2096 ZERO

1. The Disk Data Base

#DDB

ddb.geometry.cylinders = "16383"

ddb.geometry.heads = "16"

ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"

ddb.geometry.biosCylinders = "60801"

ddb.geometry.biosHeads = "255"

ddb.geometry.biosSectors = "63"

ddb.adapterType = "ide"

ddb.toolsVersion = "7363"

And the Vista one to:

1. Disk DescriptorFile

version=1

CID=6776a462

parentCID=ffffffff

createType="partitionedDevice"

1. Extent description

RW 63 FLAT "Vista-pt.vmdk" 0

RW 409593177 ZERO

RW 616 ZERO

RW 567177216 FLAT "/dev/disk1s2" 0

RW 2096 ZERO

1. The Disk Data Base

#DDB

ddb.adapterType = "ide"

ddb.geometry.biosSectors = "63"

ddb.geometry.biosHeads = "255"

ddb.geometry.biosCylinders = "60801"

ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"

ddb.geometry.heads = "16"

ddb.geometry.cylinders = "16383"

ddb.toolsVersion = "7363"

I'm assuming that the way the two volumes are mapped into the virtual machine doesn't match what the bootloader expects.

Does anyone have any recommendations as to what to do here?

Thanks for your help!

[rcardona2k]

Are you creating your own virtual machine using these partition descriptors or using VMware's Boot Camp machines? VMware sets up the Boot Camp partition properly for booting. When something goes wrong you can delete the Boot Camp partition virtual machine metadata stored in ~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp. You would delete the folder corresponding to disk and Fusion will recreate the virtual machine, the vmdk and prepare the partition.

Do you need both of these OS's in Boot Camp? Another possibility is to migrate one of these machines to a regular Fusion file-based VMDK and work with it that way. The IO is bit faster for a VM of a this type. From your description, XP might be a good candidate for this.

[totalslacker]

I tried both the virtual machine's that VMWare created plus tried creating my own with rawDiskCreator - no luck either way.

I could potentially move the XP machine to a VM but in reality I'd rather keep both in bootcamp. I do a lot of software development and while most of it would work fine in VMWare, there are times when you really have to go back to Bootcamp...

I did download the 2.0 beta of vmware - I will try deleting the /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp folder and see if 2.0 can handle it better.

Hmmm, nope - same thing happens there. Bootloader error if I choose Vista, works if XP...