On Saturday 12 May 2007, Barton Callender wrote:
I'm for not giving accurate information, I am able to create new virtual machines as a non-root user. I have windowsXP and Ubuntu installed on my hard drive as well. So I am trying to create a new virtual machine with custom settings, and using my hard drive, so I can boot windowsXP or Ubuntu while Im in CentOS 5. But when I reach to the end of the settings it tells me I do not have permission to access that file.
Please read the VMware documentation about 'dual boot' installs (specifically, the Virtual Machine Guide, section "Using Disks in a Virtual Machine"; "Configuring Hard Disk Storage in a Virtual Machine"; "Disk Types: Virtual and Physical"; "Physical (Raw) Disk" and the paragraph immediately below the caution (not counting the caution, this is the third paragraph of the section).
Note that Windows XP will want to reactivate every time you boot in the VM after having booted the hard drive, and vice versa (XP is seeing a different PC each time; the bare host hardware when native booted, and a PC called 'VMware' when booted inside VMware Server). Also note that the hardware VMware server presents to the VM's is radically different from the hardware the bare OS sees, especially the video card, network card, audio driver, and motherboard chipset. VMware recommends that you do not do this, in other words, and you can cause serious issues on the dual booted OS's if you do it.
Now, if you want to always boot these others under VMware server, you can just do that; but dual-booting and VMware running of the VM's is going to cause the guest OS's (especially XP) loads of problems.