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Disk Partition Specification

Existing IDE drives on the host computer can be used as virtual machine disk drives. If an existing partition is empty, an operating system can be installed in the partition. If the host is a dual-boot or multi-boot system, then bootable partitions on the host computer can also be booted within the virtual machine. VMware Workstation does not support using existing disk partitions on RAID or network disk drives. Use of existing disk partitions on SCSI disk drives is not supported at this time. Technical notes on the VMware Web site provide additional information about using existing disk partitions.

It is generally not possible or advisable to run the host operating system again inside the virtual machine. Doing so may cause the host system to crash and possibly cause disk corruption if two operating systems attempt to use the same disk partitions concurrently.

Disk Partition Hiding

When configuring an existing disk partition, you are given the option of enabling disk partition hiding. The disk partition hiding option is useful if you are running multiple operating systems at the same time and you are not running an advanced boot manager, such as PowerQuest's BootMagic or V Communications' 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 from and attempts to repair that file system. This may damage your disk and cause your computer to crash.

Some advanced boot managers solve this problem by changing the partition type of all the partitions not needed by the operating system being booted to an unknown type. If you are not using an advanced boot manager, then selecting the Disk Partition Hiding option does the same thing.

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.

With disk partition hiding enabled, an advanced boot manager program run inside a virtual machine does not function properly. If you wish to use an advanced boot manager program or install a new boot manager from within a virtual machine, the Disk Partition Hiding option should be turned off.

Four IDE Virtual Device Limit

A virtual machine can have at most four virtual IDE disk devices. If a host system has four disk drives, then configuring all four disk drives in the virtual machine does not leave space for a virtual IDE CD-ROM drive. Even if the host computer has a SCSI CD-ROM, the drive should be configured inside the virtual machine as an IDE device. If you have configured four IDE disks in a single virtual machine, you are warned at the end of the disk configuration panels that you do not have room for a CD-ROM drive. At that point, you can either continue to configure your virtual machine without a CD-ROM, or you can use the Prev button to return to the previous screens and remove one or more of the configured hard drives.

The Wizard always requires that the first IDE disk drive found be configured as virtual IDE drive 0:0.

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