Booting physical disk immediately freezes

[discursively1]

Hello,

I have encountered a vexatious and seemingly inexplicable problem.

I have been successfully using Vmware Workstation 6.0.1 to run Windows XP off a single partition on an external USB drive -- all within an Ubuntu linux 7.10 host. Everything used to work dapper --- but since upgrading whenever I try to boot a virtual machine using a physical disk, it gets stuck with 100% CPU usage immediately after the vmware BIOS. There is just a static cursor:

Everything works fine when I use a virtual disk ... it's just not going with the physical disk. I have tried this with two different USB disks, and the same problem ocurs. So it's not a problem with the disk itself. I have tried formatting the drive, etc. No difference.

This is how I set up the VM:

File --> New VM --> Custom --> Harware Compatibility: workstation 6 --> GuestOS: XP Pro > Name/location deafults> One processo --> 512 mb memory --> Bridged networking --> SCSI adaptor BusLogic --> Use a physical disk --> Device /dev/sdb Use individual partitions --> Partition 3 20gb NTFS --> Finish. Power-on and then I get to the blank screen and no futher.

Any help at all will be immensely appreicated!

Simon

[continuum]

The blinking cursor looks like a not activated partition - have you tried to boot the XP from a floppy-image to work around such issues ?

[discursively1]

Thanks for your reply. I did checked from linux: the relevant partition does have the boot flag set. I can access the drived from within another VM fine.... I've also tried to use the Windows setup "repair you computer" option by booting from the Windows CD---but the repair system too cannot find the drive either.

Stragely enough, the same thing happens when I use a different, freshly formatted, disk.....

Simon

EDIT: I was playing around with the drive from within linux, and decided to try and install grub on it to change the mbr. That and a combination of chaning the "boot" flag in fdisk got one of my disks going! The trouble is, I can't recreate the procedure on the disk which matters ... I've installed grub with the "recheck" option:

simon@frege:~$ sudo grub-install --recheck /dev/sdb

and set the partition to "boot" -- but to no avail. I can't thin kof anything else I might have done to the first disk which now works.

It's utterly mysterious to me.

Simon