I should have asked how big your setup was currently.

Oh well, yes the Windows apps take a while to install, been there myself.

If I were to re-do the whole drive, not knowing it's size I might do it as such:

/dev/sda - standard 100MB boot
/dev/sdb - 90% of remaining space as an LVM PV
/dev/sdc - remaining space as future Windows volume

In the LVM VG formed from /dev/sdb, create a / lv of say 8GB, a swap lv of say 2GB and a /home lv of say 16GB, save whatever is left for additional storage, maybe for shared files (/shared) or commercial apps (/opt) or whatever. The sizes are simply suggestions, but try to not allocate all free space.

You can then install Windows from within vmware by making /dev/sdc a raw disk for vmware. Once it's installed you could add an entry in grub to boot into it.

If you just want to access it from vmware you could forgo /dev/sdc and just create another lv for windows, but if you want to play directX games I think you will be out of luck.

To use Xen hardware virtualization you will need a recent processor that supports it, there is a flag in cpuinfo that can tell you if it does I forget which one it is. Google will tell you or some kind soul on the list will volunteer it.

-Ross


-----Original Message-----
From: centos-bounces@centos.org <centos-bounces@centos.org>
To: CentOS Mailing List <centos@centos.org>
Sent: Tue Nov 20 08:34:47 2007
Subject: Re: [CentOS] Dual boot box: WinXP & CentOS 5: ImpossibletorestoreWinXP?

On Monday, 19 November 2007, "Ross S. W. Walker" <rwalker@medallion.com> wrote:
<snip>
>I wouldn't necessarily wipe the whole HD, just the windows partition.

Ross: That would be a little faster. It would take me about 2-3
additional hours, to reinstall CentOS5 and restore everything.
Installing Windows and it's applications it *VERY* time consuming.
But, if I dont redo my CentOS installation, I won't  have room for
VMware Server. I won't have time to do this for 2 or 3 days, so I
still have time to decide on the path to take.  :-) Minimum, I will
wipe MS Windows and install it with the new English language CD I got
from Dell last week.

>You could also use Xen in CentOS 5 for your Windows virtualization.
I'd wait for 5.1 though which will be more refined then version 5.

Does Xen require a special CPU or motherboard? Thanks much, for all of
your ideas! Lanny
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