Guest Operating System Installation Guide

[fishinwa]

Being new to VMware, the instructions to install a guest operating system seem to be a little vague. "Just follow the installation process" gets a little daunting when you see (also attached):

Windows 2000 Professional Setup.

Setup has determined that your computer's startup hard disk is new or has been erased, or that your computer is running an operating system that is incompatible with Windows 2000.

If the hard disk is new or has been erased, or you want to discard its current contents, you can choose to continue Setup.

If your computer is running an operating system that is incompatible with Windows 2000, continuing Setup may damage or destroy the existing operating system.

To continue Setup, press C.

CAUTION: Any data currently on your computer's startup hard disk will be permanently lost.

To exit Setup, press F3.

Am I to trust that the space allocated for a Guest OS is all that will be affected? OR will this erase my installation of Windows Vista Ultimate and all of my other data?

[AWo]

If you run this setup surely within your guest and you spend your guest virtual disks which are NOT mapped to physical disks/partitions (that means you created .vmdk files during the guest setup) than you can be pretty sure that your physical installation won't be affected.

Otherwise many people would have faced serious problems in the past....

AWo

[fishinwa]

I see. But you mean if I run the setup within the Virtual Machine in order to set up the guest, right? In other words I should have a VMname.vmdk and this becomes the guest? Not sure I've got this quite straight.

[AWo]

When you create a guest you're asked for the harddisks the guest should use. This can be a file (.vmdk) or a physical partition or disk (RDM; raw device mapping). Most of the time the .vmdk files are used and they make up your guest harddrive where you create the partitions etc. This file together with some other files like the BIOS settings and the guest configuration make up your guest.

If you start your guest, it will behave like any other hardware. It will boot and stop if there's no OS installed on the virtual disks you assigned to it. That is the case when you assigned newly created .vmdk files (during the guest creation). You always can find the virtual disks and their type you have assigned by looking in the guests hardware settings dialog.

If you put an OS CD into the CD-ROM, which also must be assigned and connected to the guest, you will see that the guest starts to boot from this one (while you can see you host OS running in the background of the VMworkstation application window).

Therefore all activities you perfom within in guest via the guests console window are kept isolated within the guest. If you partition or format a disk there, this will be performed on the disk you assigned to the guest. If this is a .vmdk file this will be this file, if it is a physical partition or disk it will be this device.

AWo

[fishinwa]

Very cool. I installed Widows NT (subsequently applied SP6), then upgraded it to Windows 2000 Professional. WOW!

and Install VMware Tools is a must!

Thanks for the clarification!