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Miscellaneous Configuration

You can also use the Configuration Editor to set other parameters for your virtual machine.

Require SHIFT in hot key sequences.

Check this box to change hot-key combinations from CTL-ALT-key to CTL-ALT-SHIFT-key. This is useful if you want to prevent certain key combinations (for instance, CTL-ALT-DEL) from being intercepted by VMware instead of being sent to the guest OS.

Logging level

VMware always logs important events in a log file, so that if the program crashes, or other critical event occurs, some information is available to help VMware technical support understand the problem, find workarounds, and fix it in a later product release. Log files are normally written to the directory that contains the virtual machine configuration file.

In many cases, however, the logged information is not sufficient. An error message may ask you to run with the logging level set to debug and try to repeat the problem. This enables additional logging that can make it easier, or possible, to fix the problem.

Enabling debugging information makes the log file grow faster, and also turns on a large number of internal consistency checks that can slow down execution. For this reason, unless you are trying to reproduce a problem, it is best to run with the level set to normal.

Hide partition type of read-only partitions

This option is useful if you are using raw disk partitions, are running multiple operating systems at the same time, and you are not using an advanced boot manager, such as PowerQuest's BootMagic or V Communication's System Commander. For example, if you are running Windows NT from a FAT partition, and you boot Windows 98 from another partition, Windows 98 sees the partition that Windows NT is running on, and attempts to repair that file system. This may damage your disk and/or cause your computer to crash. Partition Hiding is not made available if the guest operating system is MS-DOS or Linux because these operating systems do not attempt to automatically file check other FAT partitions.

Some advanced boot managers, but not basic boot managers such as LILO or NT MultiBoot, solve this problem by changing the partition type of all the partitions not needed by the operating system being booted to "unknown" type. If you are not using a boot manager, then selecting Disk Partition Hiding has the same effect.

When this option is enabled, only the partitions for which the virtual machine has Read/Write access are visible to the guest operating system. The other partitions are changed to "unknown" type. In addition, all writes to the Master Boot Record (MBR) where this information is recorded, are intercepted. This allows multiple operating systems to run on the same disk, but with different views of the same partitions.

Because of this feature, however, one of these advanced boot manager program run inside a virtual machine with Disk Partition Hiding enabled will not function properly. If you wish to use an advanced boot manager program, or install a new boot manager from within a virtual machine, then the Disk Partition Hiding option should be turned off. See Configuring IDE Drives and Configuring Disk Partitions for more information on configuring and using raw disks.

Redo Log Directory

If a path name is enabled, VMware stores all redo logs in that directory.