[plug] Large HD and VMWare's raw partitions

[Dennis Plester]

Subba,

Apart from the answers you have already received from either list, can I ask
you one?

Do you really, really need raw disk access in VMWare? Will another "real" NT
or other M$ OS (rather than one running in the virtual machine) need to be
able to use this partition directly? If the answer is no, I'd go for using a
virtual file system within VMWare instead. My own experience has been that
general file access is much faster, due to the better performance seen with
ext2 vs vfat/fat, etc. It is particularly noticeable during booting, and
general disk usage associated with copying, moving and particularly,
defragmenting! (Instant)

 If another doesn't need immediate access to a real file system, but you
want to share drives, that's not a problem either. Setting up shares with
samba or using file sharing between virtual M$ operating systems is easy
with VMWare. It will even set up some of these automatically.

If you still really want a true physical fat/vfat, it sounds like you
haven't formatted the actual partitions in question as fat/vfat. The easiest
way in my opinion would be to set up the virtual machine with raw partition
access aimed at the partition in question with full read/write access. Then,
boot the virtual machine, and use the NT install set up floppy to format the
partition within the virtual machine for NT. Or, if you prefer, switch on
CDROM booting in the virtual machine's BIOS, and boot directly off the NT
CD, if it supports it

Hope this helps.

Dennis.


-----Original Message-----
From:	Subba Rao [SMTP:subb3 at attglobal.net]
Sent:	Tuesday, January 16, 2001 1:32 AM
To:	Perth Linux Users
Subject:	[plug] Large HD and VMWare's raw partitions


One of my Linux system has a slave disk which is 20GB.

(0)root at myhost:/~# fdisk /dev/hdc

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 2646.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help)

(0)root at myhost:~/

The disk partitions at the begining of the disk are Linux ext2 filesystems.
Four partitions at the end of the disk are FAT16/msdos. The DOS partitions
have been defined in /etc/fstab but at bootup time, these file systems are
not getting mounted. I cannot even mount them manually. When I tried to
mount
them,
	mount -t auto /dev/hdc5 /msdos

then the filesystem is mounted as a ext2 filesystems. When I try to mount
them
as msdos filesystems,

	mount -t msdos /dev/hdc5 /msdos

then the following message appears:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc5,
       or too many mounted file systems

The goal is to create a raw partition for VMWare on the /dev/hdc5 partition
and
install NT over it rely on M$ systems.

How can I create raw partitions for VMware on large HDs and mount them? 

Thank you in advance.

Subba Rao
subb3 at attglobal.net
http://pws.prserv.net/truemax/