How-to: VMware player modification

posted Oct 24th 2005 11:00am by
filed under: pcs hacks

VMware
Last week the free VMware player was released. It lets you run virtual machines, but not create them. [Faileas] contributed today’s how-to for creating your own virtual machines.

Programs required to carry out hack:

  1. Copy of VMware Player

  2. Browser appliance or another virtual machine(browser appliance is the smallest one, by size, and thus I am using that)

  3. Notepad or other text editor

  4. ISO image or CD/floppy of FreeDOS (I’m using the ripcord distribution) or MSDOS 7.1 would work as well, but i haven’t tried it yet.

  5. Replacement OS (must have SCSI HDD support)

Once you’ve downloaded the browser appliance or whatever image you intend to use, the first step is to open up and edit the browser-appliance.vmx file. I used notepad for this, though any text editor should do.

I’d reccomend changing the settings as needed, though these are what i suggest. Change the value of memsize to 64 from 256. For most operating systems this is sufficient and you can change this later as needed.

Part 1: Using an ISO
The image i am using has been setup to use the physical CD-Rom drive of my system. Not really desireable when you want to install from a downloaded ISO. While using daemontools, or a similar CD mounting program is an option, a more elegant method would be to use VMware player’s own ability to read ISOs.

At this point i suggest saving and making a copy of the browser-appliance.vmx file, since it might be desireable to use a physical CD-Rom drive at a later point of time.

To do this replace:
ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

with:
ide1:0.fileName = "C:targetcd.iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

Where C:targetcd.iso is the location of the disk you intend to use. Once this is done, save the edited vmx file and run it.

Part 2: Removing the current OS

Now, at the startup screenstart screen
press escape and choose to boot from the CD drive at the next screen. If all goes well, you should be greeted by
boot
where you should choose to boot from CDrom. From there menu
choose to boot to the second option “FreeDOS ** FAT32. At the next screentoreto
pick the first option, to “boot with el toreto cd rom driver” (default)driver
and then the second option, to run FreeDOS from CD command prompt.

Now the fun part



120 Responses to How-to: VMware player modification

  • hex4def6 says:

    Now the next thing to do would be to create a portable version of the vmware player, so that you can have the image and player on a flash drive / other portable storage. Anyone attempted doing that?

  • I do know something similar has been done with small distributions of linux, but I don’t know it’s been done with vmware specifically.

  • Pyr0 says:

    Works great with ubuntu. After step one you can install it normally. Get the .iso here: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/

  • vbrtrmn says:

    CAKE! I’m installing Ubuntu onto my virtual drive now… will be installing OSX, once I get a good IMG.

  • n3ldan says:

    Not bad, not bad. I’ve been using VMware Workstation 5, it’s great. I run it inside linux, so when I *need* windows support I can have it. Just need to stick it on my iPod so I can use linux at school…..

  • confused says:

    i don’t want to sound too stupid, but what is this for?

  • george says:

    I think the point of this is you can make your own virtual machines with a free program (vmware player) and not have to pay a crapload or pirate the vmware workstation or server software. Its a win win.

  • The vmware player poses great potential for modification of exsisting files. If someone would write a howto on editing your own files. If some one create a site then it could, in effect, create a free vmware for hardcore geeks.

  • flaunt_dzx says:

    The “browser appliance” comes with ubuntu linux,gnome, and firefox. It’s a great setup.

    Thanks for the hack! I’m sure it’ll come in handy.

  • Ixje says:

    awesome one :) *bookmark*

  • covert.entity says:

    “…comes with ubuntu linux,gnome, and firefox”

    I have ubuntu running on my desktop and I was very confused when I opened vmplayer and ubuntu started loading. I thought it was reloading my OS in a window.

    BTW, if you are running Ubuntu 5.10, you will have to run the following command:

    apt-get install gcc-3.4 g++-3.4

    You might need to do some more as well… a quick search for vmplayer on the ubuntu forums will yield results.

  • Tom61 says:

    Hmm… I wonder if I can get Windows going well enough using VMPlayer under Linux to use Launchcast. I’ve had no luck getting Launchcast to work under QEmu or WINE.

  • bryan says:

    So how would I set up an xp instance under ubuntu or fedora? Also, does any one know how this will work with 64 bit stuff?
    -bryan

  • Faileas says:

    Considering i wrote this :)

    #1- been thinking about that. VMware uses its own drivers to hook onto the host system’s networking so its a little tricky. If i figure it out, i’ll be sure to let you know.

    I do believe that technically you *could* make a live CD with VMware player for linux, and add in the appropriate drivers for accessing images from a HDD(maybe Knoppix?).Its a total cludge IMHO, but could work.

    Ravi “Faileas” Mohan

    #5-Its a workaround for some functionality missing in the free version of VMware.

    #7- i’m going to be working on that next holidays and trying to document the VMware player’s config files, and methods of editing the HDD images(IE adding in files into the client from the host).

    #12- If the processor on the host is 64 bit,you can run 64 bit operating systems. The process is almost the same on linux, and you can, by editing the config file to point at a windows ISO, or windows install cd, get XP on it. In fact, i have (thanks to one of my computers getting fried) a stripped down (using http://www.nliteos.com/ nlite to modify the cd to remove unwanted components) install of windows XP running happily on 64 megs of ram on VMware, so yeah, it works, and is pretty much the same as installing any other OS

  • brakjoller says:

    I got so far that I could start installing Windows XP, but some minutes into the installation it complained that I did not have any hard drives. Any idea on which step I did wrong or is this a XP-only issue?

  • Faileas says:

    #14: i did some checking up, apparently windows XP lacks the SCSI drivers that VMware virtutal SCSI hdds need.

    http://www.vmware.com/support/reference/common/guest_win_scsidrv.html
    you can download the driver from there, edit the line in the config file from floppy0.fileName = “A:” to point to the driver image, and when installing tell the win XP installer that you need additional SCSI drivers. I haven’t had a chance to test this out personally, but it should work.

    alternately you could find a IDE based disk image, such as the syllable OS disk image ( http://www.fprintf.net/atheos/atheosvm.html ) uses, and use that directly

  • light says:

    If I remember right #14, Win XP can have problems when trying to use non standard SCSI drivers during install (it prefers IDE drives.) I think there is some way to work around it by picking an option to load the driver from a floppy at install, but I’m not sure how that would work through VMware. Someone correct me if I am wrong however.

  • deltaf says:

    The syllable vm rocks! #16 was right-on. I think the key to hacking success will be in the proper documentation of the vmx and vmdx files. So far, I think they’re not documented too well because everyone has relied on the official tools to create the files for them.

    Any links to the specific files format values are welcome.

    Some interesting links I’ve found:
    VMware files: http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_learning_files_in_a_vm.html
    Some tools and links: http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/index.html
    VB/GUI front-ends to official tool console apps: http://petruska.stardock.net/software/VMware/index.html

    Thanks to VMWare for opening the door to us hackers in a somewhat legitimate fashion. I forsee a lot of converts. My experiences so far will probably allow me to get rid of a computer or two that I use for client/server testing.. The money saved may very well go into a full version of this software!

  • bryan says:

    I just popped my fedora core four dvd in, hit escape, and booted from cd. It is installing over the ubuntu stuff right now, no problems. How does VMware work for graphics? ex: have vmware player running xp under fedora, how would 3d and fast graphics look?
    -bryan

  • It was only a matter of time until someone did this. I’m glad you guys were quick about it. This should be fun. :)

  • Rhys says:

    Hey, Incase you don’t read slashdot? You can use QEMU-img.exe to create VMDK(VMare virtual disk files meaning you don’t need to download the browser image. Also I think this will create files that can be used as ide drives.

    Quick and easy:
    1 Download the the vmplayer
    2. create a vmdk disk file like this:
    qemu-img.exe create -f vmdk
    3.Create a vmx config file. Here are the basic options you need:

    config.version = “8″
    virtualHW.version = “3″
    memsize = “128″
    ide0:0.present = “TRUE”
    ide0:0.fileName = “DiskFile.vmdk”

    ——-TO BOOT AN ISO———-
    ide1:0.present = “TRUE”
    ide1:0.fileName = “c:debian.iso”
    ide1:0.deviceType = “cdrom-image”
    ———————————–
    OR
    ——-TO BOOT CDROM———–
    ide1:0.present = “TRUE”
    ide1:0.fileName = “auto detect”
    ide1:0.deviceType = “cdrom-raw”
    ———————————
    floppy0.fileName = “A:”
    ethernet0.present = “TRUE”
    ethernet0.connectionType = “nat”
    usb.present = “TRUE”
    sound.present = “TRUE”
    sound.virtualDev = “es1371″
    displayName = “Debian 1″
    guestOS = “other24xlinux”
    nvram = “debian1.nvram”
    scsi0:0.redo = “”
    ethernet0.addressType = “generated”
    uuid.location = “56 4d f3 a5 03 8c cb b9-ed bb 8f 10 a3 de b0 10″
    uuid.bios = “56 4d f3 a5 03 8c cb b9-ed bb 8f 10 a3 de b0 10″
    ide1:0.autodetect = “TRUE”
    ethernet0.generatedAddress = “00:0c:29:de:b0:10″
    ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = “0″
    checkpoint.vmState = “”
    tools.remindInstall = “TRUE”
    ide0:0.redo = “”

    Now just run up the vmx file in the player. Boot the cdrom/iso and install the os as usual.

    EasyAs!
    Cheers,
    Rhys

  • pman says:

    so..does this let me run a virtual copy of mac osx on my windows xp machine?

  • LEMMYSLENDER says:

    Thanks rhys (21),
    Used QEMU created a 1GB virtual drive, created a vmx file for it and booted from a live cd image (slax). Now I have a place to store settings for slax (virtual hard drive). The empty drive takes up less than a 0.5MB which will grow as I add files, not an 800MB image. With VMPlayer installed on the machines I use, I could fit my new Slax iso image and a virtual hard drive on a 256MB thumb drive. Which will run much faster than using QEMU, etc.

    Also if you enter the bios setup you can set it to boot from the CD-ROM first automatically.

  • covert.entity says:

    #22 (pman)

    No, not with the PPC version at least. Maybe the x86 version is supported, although I doubt it.

  • deltaf says:

    To #22 & #24, yes tiger_x86 booted for me, first try. It was very slow and I had some glitches in the font rendering.

    I don’t know if it was a glitch in the image, a hardware conflict that required some 3D acceleration that I didn’t have, or what..

    Then I realized I don’t care about osx and dumped it all. ;)

    Thanks for the qemu link!

  • Ben Hiller says:

    Hah, my school blocks your site under the category of \’hacking\’.

  • flaunt_dzx says:

    22&24 It looks like VMware is emulating a 440bx motherboard. I think the motherboard that apple was shipping was a i915G. That may be a problem.

    I think it will mostly have to do with your processor supporting sse2 and sse3 though.

    If someone has an image of osx x86 they should try it and let us know.

  • flaunt_dzx says:

    Actually, if I’m not mistaken, it looks as if the image that everyone is downloading to install os x is a vmware image.

    I’d have to say it may work then.

  • grundlebug says:

    You could also just download the fully functional VMWare Workstation demo, create your virtual machine, and then use the player to run it after the 30 day evaluation period is up on the full version.

  • gtoal says:

    Has anyone noticed that although the VMware player site says you can only run one image at a time, that’s not in fact true! Just by double-clicking on the container files, you start up another copy of the program and can run as many images as you want simultaneously. By the way I had a WinXP image left over from an expired trial download and it ran fine in the player. Saved all changes etc, just as good as the full program. I wonder if they’ll dumb it down when it comes out of beta – I think they may not have realised just how much they were giving away :-)

  • pau1 says:

    still no joy on the scsi drivers. I have tried two different drivers (provided by vmware) so far: vmscsi-1.2.0.2.flp and VMware-BusLogic-SCSIDriver-1.2.0.0.flp. However, the Ubuntu VM is telling me that I have a LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c1030 PCI-X Fusion-MPT Dual, so it’s probably NOT the second one. Also, all the tips on qemu-img are crapping out because it reports back as an invalid format. would love to get 2000 / xp running on this…

  • Gurubuckaroo says:

    I’ve got the qemu-img volume working just fine, no SCSI drivers required. I’ve got two images running on my XP machine – a 2000 server and a FreeBSD server, both using 8G virtual disks and 128M memory, bridge-mode networking. Couldn’t be smoother. The instructions for running the qemu-img command were a touch lacking – the actual command line is:
    qemu-img create -f vmdk filename.vmdk 8G
    (or whatever size/filename you need). Worked perfectly (at least under XP pro). Make sure you customize the .vmx to point to seperate nvram and vmdk files, include ONLY the CD section you need (attached to real drive or image, not both), then just double-click on the .vmx.

  • Here is the link to Qemu for the Qemu-img program

    For windows: http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/
    For Linux: http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/download.html

    For Mac Users I dont think this applies sorry.

  • I forgot to mention that you will have to download the full package (qemu-0.X.X) as the img program is not distributed by its self.

  • Faileas says:

    #31
    try the athena disk image on #16

  • John Bokma says:

    A little howto based on stuff I read here (installing XP Pro, but also works for Win2Kpro):http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2005/10/26/vmware-player-windows-xp.html

  • spaz says:

    So for those of you who are lazy (like me) i created an image using directions provided by Rhys (#21). The image is a 100GB disk and has a vmx file that is the default provided above(CD is .iso)

    http://www.blankstare.net/blank.zip

    The file is about 12MB extracted, and 22KB compressed. Enjoy.

  • Les Mikesell says:

    Does anyone know if it is possible to coax vmware player into using the native partitions of a dual-boot Windows/Linux setup?

  • jp says:

    is there a way to make it so that I can access my VM from different computers. When I try to access my VM which is on an ipod from a computer different from the one that I created it on the initial screen will display but I can’t do anything to interact with the VM.

  • pau1 says:

    I can confirm that post #21 works great for creating an image and installing Windows 2000. Just need to get the video drivers now. Usually they come with vmtools and are part of the VM Workstation package. Any idea how I can get them otherwise? Also, in response to #39′s post… you may want to check and make sure the drive your vm lives on is compatible with VMPlayer. I was using an ext2 drive mounted under Windows 2000 (using ext2fsd drivers) and it just would not work. Put it on an ntfs partition, and all was good.

  • Ciosciammocca says:

    Really quick, all I did was make the changes below and it worked:
    replace:
    ide1:0.fileName = “auto detect”
    ide1:0.deviceType = “cdrom-raw”
    with:
    ide1:0.fileName = “an iso of an os right on the root of C:”
    ide1:0.deviceType = “cdrom-image”

  • Chui Tey says:

    In reply to post #38. This site on VMWare deals with booting from a raw disk. I haven’t tried it though.
    http://www.vmware.com/support/ws45/doc/disks_dualboot_ws.html

  • Borgel says:

    How is it exactly that you can transfer files INTO to virtual machine. I cant get the virtual machine to see a flash drive and I wan to throw some files back and forth.

  • rich says:

    I an tring to boot off an Longhong.iso but its a DVD image. I have tried the above configurations, but no luck. I am able to use a CD image(XP).
    Any suggestions.

  • nugget says:

    DSL does something with quem or however its spelt to run from a jump drive. You could go check out their site and ask them if they have any tips for you. damnsmalllinux.org I belive if not a google search should turn something up for you.

  • eliphas says:

    hello I am quite new to vmplayer and I was wondering if I choose the option in fdisk to delete my non-dos partition.
    I am goign to really format it and then loose all my datas on that partition? as i use my computer for work it will be hoffic to loose those data.

    Thanks for you help.

  • eliphas says:

    hello I am quite new to vmplayer and I was wondering if I choose the option in fdisk to delete my non-dos partition.
    I am goign to really format it and then loose all my datas on that partition? as i use my computer for work it will be hoffic to loose those data.

    Thanks for you help.

  • Jriff says:

    “One limitation is that you cannot use this disk image to install an OS without SCSI support.”

    I don’t seem to undestand why SCSI support is nessary for this to work? Dosn’t VMware support virtual IDE disks?

  • Flisher says:

    the image of the hard disk, is a 10g scsi.

    even virtual, the drive is a scsi emulated one.

    BTW, is there any way to “shrink” a disk image?
    I mean if the file is 2g big, but you flush all file, the file on the hard disk is still 2g.

  • Faileas says:

    #47
    Quite simply because the disk i was working off was scsi based. The method that was suggested later (to use QEMU instead to create the disks) bypassed that, but quite simply i was “stuck” with a scsi disk.

    it should however work with an IDE image as well, though a great deal of what i ended up doing could be bypassed

    #45/46
    I assure you in the method i was using its totally safe. You need to think of it as a computer in a computer and whatever you do in the VM (or in VMplayer) should not affect the rest of your system.

    Though, i think the QEMU based method, together with the script provided in a later hackaday links post seem to be a better way to do it, once you figure out the config file.

  • mtxf says:

    Ive tried both methods (the main article method and using qemu) however when i try to boot my slackware 10.0 cd using any of the kernels it keeps getting a kernel panic and stops loading… anyone know how to fix this problem, or how to find out what’s causing it?

  • Bench says:

    #21. I have try the QEMU method and it works. Forget the SCSI image stuff, just create an file image using QEMU and boot using an ISO cdrom image (for some reason, the reading from phyical CDROM does not work, for WINXP anyway).

  • beamer says:

    Wanted to re-use a WIN98 license recovered from an old PC not used anymore with vmplayer under ubuntu 5.10. Tried the images in #16 and #21.
    DOS-floppy and WIN98 setup (copied from original CD to c:-drive) is starting fine, but hangs several times (I did a reset when it was hanging). Can’t get it working (apart from command line mode). Does anybody know how to do this. Is maybe the creation of and image with vmware trial version needed?

  • zox says:

    this is great! perfect tool for those who like to tests and try apps before install on “production” mashine.

    But we come to the next step in exploring posibilities of vmware toy.
    Actually I need to have two NIC cards on VM in order to be able to test some software routers (i.e. MikroTik). So, is tehre a way to get second virtual NIC card?
    I’ve checked on the net but with no success.
    Any idea?

  • Kim says:

    As an addition to #40, if we can’t get the vmtools package, is it possible to find out what video card vmware is emulating under Windows 2000, and download some manufacturers drivers for that?

  • Faileas says:

    beamer: maybe its an issue with the install CD. I got win 3.11 working (over what seems to be a GPLed MS dos7), and managed to install win 95 over it with no problem

    Zox: i think dual virtual NICs are a feature thats only on their server based systems. Its a hardware issue and VMware hardware is generally fixed.

  • geezus says:

    Another way to make your own virtual machines (or templates to install whatever you want on it)

    Get the trial version of vmware Workstation and create the machines. They will still work after the trial expired

  • bcp1551 says:

    should solve any scsi problems

    #!/usr/bin/vmware
    config.version = “8″
    virtualHW.version = “3″
    scsi0.present = “FALSE”
    scsi0.virtualDev = “lsilogic”
    memsize = “256″
    MemAllowAutoScaleDown = “FALSE”
    scsi0:0.present = “FALSE”
    scsi0:0.fileName = “x.vmdk”
    ide0:0.present = “TRUE”
    ide0:0.filename = “x.vmdk”
    ide1:0.present = “TRUE”
    ide1:0.fileName = “auto detect”
    ide1:0.deviceType = “atapi-cdrom”
    floppy0.present = “FALSE”
    ethernet0.present = “TRUE”
    usb.present = “FALSE”
    sound.present = “FALSE”
    sound.virtualDev = “es1371″
    displayName = “TEST1″
    guestOS = “ubuntu”
    nvram = “x.nvram”
    MemTrimRate = “-1″

    ide1:0.autodetect = “TRUE”
    ide0:0.autodetect = “TRUE”

    scsi0:0.redo = “”
    ethernet0.addressType = “generated”
    uuid.location = “56 4d 85 72 dd 09 67 73-96 00 f8 f3 02 29 1f 18″
    uuid.bios = “56 4d 85 72 dd 09 67 73-96 00 f8 f3 02 29 1f 18″
    ethernet0.generatedAddress = “00:0c:29:29:1f:18″
    ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = “0″

    tools.syncTime = “TRUE”
    ide1:0.startConnected = “TRUE”

    uuid.action = “create”

    checkpoint.vmState = “”

    ide0:0.redo = “”
    tools.remindInstall = “TRUE”

  • bcp1551 says:

    one more thing:
    http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-doc.html#SEC15
    Use qemu-image to make an IDE img and convert to vmware’s format use vmx above…this way you don’t need any scsi support
    qemu-image (make an image)
    qemu-image convert (your image)
    maybe somebody can distribute a blank IDE HD image made this way…

  • beamer says:

    Thanks to the great link in #60 I finally got win98 running (issue #53). set guest os to the right value “win98″ and it works fine. Now needed to get video drivers (issues #40 and #55). After some googling, I found an iso-image with the drivers under http://www.vmware.com/download1/software/support/windows.iso

  • ricardo says:

    working or template files for creating your own virtual machine. qemu-img.exe is included along with some very terse guide/example text files.

    http://s42.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=1BE5NA22M9B6C0VVKQMJF51HVJ

  • alex says:

    I installed windows 2000 Pro on a VM hosted in Ubuntu 5.10 using this method, and Launchcast works perfectly (though IE responds slowly with 64M of ram). The graphics are awful, but I haven’t yet installed the SVGA drivers from #61.

    This could open the door for a lot people that can’t use Linux full-time because they need one or two windows only apps. Great work.

  • ricardo says:

    @#63
    yep, i’m thinking who needs cygwin anymore?
    i’m running an ftp server on my virtual machine and accessing it from anywhere. for some reason, it’s VERY slow to connect, but once it connects, response times are fine. i’m working on setting up an apache/web server now…

  • We need someone with VMWare Workstation 5 to install windows and linux and extract the VMWare Tools Images once they are mounted for install. The other posibility would be to find the files in a full install of VMWare Workstation 5 and then post them online.

    BTW. would a linux distro like Ubuntu with VMTools passed around be wrong or not?

  • OK i have figured it out.
    For those who want a truly VMWare experience with the mouse that hops out at the edge of the screen and all here is what to do (BTW this is legal and it doen’t involve wares, i think)

    1) Get a copy of VMWare Workstation by Evaluation the latest version.
    >> NOTE: You will need to register for the download. I recommend using a site like Dodgeit .com for a temp email or look at Bubmenot.com for an email/pass. Try bugmenot first.

    2) If you have installed the player already you will need to uninstall it as VMWare Workstation will not side by side.

    3) After installing it go to the folder you installed it at. (On windows it is most likely C:Program FilesVMWareVmware Workstation)

    4) In the folder there are a few ISO images. (freebsd, windows, linux, netware) these contain the VMTools that make things look, sound, and act better for the guest environment.

    5) Copy which one you want or copy them all it doesn’t matter to me to a different folder.

    6) Now uninstall VMWare Workstation and reinstall VMWare Player. (This is where the leagaities get shakey. If by keeping the tools and deleting the rest of the program did i break the EULA, bla bla bla … ah well)

    7) Change your VMPlayer config to reflect the ISO file.

    8) Procede with the install and you are done.

    Now you can delete the installers and you are back to using free programs with the vmtools.

  • Rhys says:

    I’ve just made the first beta of VMXWizard available for download
    http://rhysgoodwin.orcon.net.nz/vmxwizard/
    This will allow the easy creation of virtual machines for VMware Player

  • Jeff says:

    This works great with Auditor. Thanks.

  • perniciosus says:

    Hehe, so now I am running Windows on Windows… Why ? Well because I can (First post from virtual win xp ;)…

    Thanks for advice, now I just gotta figure out why to to do it.

  • Gary says:

    rhys your vmxwizard worked fine to create an Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win) config file. Nice work!

  • nathaniel says:

    Great guide and great comments. I’m proceeding through the steps from comment 66 right now. I enjoy being able to use an easy to use, quality, and free virtual machine program. Does anyone happen to know a good site that lists the plethora of vmx file options for vmware? I did however find another useful comment sight here:
    http://www.consolevision.com/members/dcgrendel/vmxform.html

    and another guide like this only using the qemu image maker here:
    http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2005/10/26/vmware-player-windows-xp.html (he credits the hack a day site taboot)

  • kim says:

    Is it possible to use the vmware player to mount real hard drive ntfs partitions inside a virtual machine?

  • miyo says:

    i just found out how to install the video driver..
    all you have to do is, open the virtual player.. within the virtual os which is win xp, grab the .iso files from the installer, extract that .iso file, open and grab the driver from there..

  • miscblogger says:

    wow! this is free?!?! man i tried it with my windows 98 CD and it worked like a charm! thanks!

  • whizARD says:

    this is a very “light article”; as of making vm portable…why would you want that? You could do this though: a flash drive it is a DRIVE after all, once is mounted (plugged in) will act as a regular drive so if you will install VMplayer on that drive and set the paths to be read from flash drive, it will work, remember that you also need to have the vmx image there; you might be able to force a persistent install on the flash drive, or to use a second flash drive on a different bus. If you want it to be both usable as boot option you’ll need to additionally create a bootable partition on that drive have a script that will point to the image file, if any of you needs more help in figuring it out give me you email and I will sent you the details or maybe the files that you need for booting up from usb.

  • ay says:

    hey, whizard, i’m interested in the usb thing. I want to boot from a usb flash drive and be able to use the emulator with the same drive to boot windows, without having to have two installations, i.e. i want to have the emulator use the flash drive, or windows to use the virtual drive.

  • skohrs says:

    If you’re running VMware Player under WinXP and need to install the guest image from several different .iso files, I found the following trick worked great.

    Create a hardlink from command prompt:
    fsutil hardlink create C:SUSE_10.0.iso C:SUSE-10.0-CD-OSS-i386-GM-CD1.iso

    Edit the .vmx file:
    ide1:0.fileName = “C:SUSE_10.0.iso”
    ide1:0.deviceType = “cdrom-image”

    Start installation.

    Create hardlink to 2nd CD from command prompt:
    del C:SUSE_10.0.iso
    fsutil hardlink create C:SUSE_10.0.iso C:SUSE-10.0-CD-OSS-i386-GM-CD2.iso

    The installation now proceeds on CD2.

  • dommy says:

    I’m stumped. I can get an iso to work, like freedos.iso, but I can’t seem to boot from a physical cdrom I always get an error message . I’m trying to set up win98 which #61 beamer says he got to work. What am I doing wrong???

  • C!$C0^211 says:

    wow thats cool i have created a VM with MS-DOS 7.1 .

  • dario says:

    Hey guys, take a look at this: http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/vmware/. There’s a lot of official VMWare related stuff. There’s also VMWare Tools for Windows as an iso named “windows.iso”! Check it out!

  • VmPlayer complain if you use qemu-img’s vmdk files as virtual SCSI disks. To get rid of this, I’ve hacked a bit QEMU 0.7.2 and introduced the “vmdks” disk format. How to use it?
    Go to http://www.ro.kde.org/ftparea/work/qemu-vmdks/
    and start reading README.txt for instructions. It’s very easy.

  • lee colleton says:

    I’ve put together a basic Ubuntu server appliance VM (sans services). It’s stripped down to run with 128MB of memory with a max of 1GB disk usage (550MB initally). The only packages installed past the base server system are the kernel-headers and build-essential metapackages. I figured anyone who uses this would appreciate it.

    if you have bittorrent:
    http://lee.colleton.net/bt/btdownload.php?type=torrent&file=UbuntuServerAppliance.zip.torrent

    if you don’t:
    http://lee.colleton.net/bt/btdownload.php?file=UbuntuServerAppliance.zip.torrent

  • Pay says:

    How-to Boot from your regular cdrom drive.
    Just point it to the drive letter of your cdrom player and make shore there are no conflicting lines in the rest of the file.

    - – - – - – - – - >-8
    ide0:1.present = “TRUE”
    ide0:1.fileName = “d:”
    ide0:1.deviceType = “cdrom-raw”
    ide0:1.autodetect = “FALSE”

  • mike says:

    hi guys,
    i can’t install winxp. dsl, kubuntu works but not winxp. i get to the point where you have to choose between “F3″,”R” and “Enter” for installation. then i get an error message that no hd is installed.
    here my conf file. i install via cd.

    ide0:0.present = “TRUE”
    ide0:0.filename = “winxp.vmdk”
    #ide0:0.mode = “independent-nonpersistent”
    #snapshot.action = “autoRevert”
    #snapshot.disabled = “TRUE”
    ide1:0.present = “TRUE”
    #ide1:0.fileName = “dsl-2.0.iso”
    #ide1:0.deviceType = “cdrom-image”
    ide1:0.deviceType = “cdrom-raw”
    ide1:0.startConnected = “TRUE”
    ide1:0.autodetect = “TRUE”

    i created the vmdk file via qemu-img create -f vmdk winxp.vmdk 2G.
    host is kubuntu 5.10.
    any ideas?

  • Wildling says:

    hi mike, in the virtual BIOS, tab “advanced”, of the vmwareplayer you have to set the ide-controler on “both” instead of “secondary”. Now your IDE-drive is recognized by the Windows-Setup

  • Gary says:

    This is a great hack. I successfully installed a nice clean WinXPSP2 as a guest to my rather cluttered XP host. This allowed me to install my development environment (Visual Studio 2005) in its entirety with no conflicts. VS2005 would not even get past the .net framework install on the host. Very nice!

    The only thing I have not figured out is how to get around the 30 day activation period for this virtual install of Windows XP. Copying my host “wpa.dbl” to the guest/system32 directory did not solve the problem.

    I also installed Mandriva 2006 with all the bells and whistles from DVD-R. The only issue I had was with the video. The workaround is easy though. Accept the VmWare graphics driver and the generic monitor during Mandriva install. The Mandriva grub bootloader provides a pick of “no fb” (no video frame buffer) on startup. The display is fine with this selected.

    The Mandriva OS connected to an ftp site and successfully downloaded and installed all the latest package updates. Impressive and fast.

    I really like running Linux on an XP box in this manner. I do not have to mess with grub/lilo on the host C:drive to allow dual boot. It is just there. You can have as many Linux OSes as you like. You are only limited by available disk space. I’m using a second 300GB hard drive to create all these VMDKs. And, I really like being able to remove an OS by simply deleting the guest VMDK folder.

  • Jim says:

    Thanks for all info. I ran across the VM Player yesterday, and in doing a bit of research I ran across this page.

    Using the VMXwizard helped alot too. In under 24 hours since first bumping across all this I have managed to get both my XP boxes running Linux, the next trick is to reconfigure my dual boot box to linux only and then getting XP up in it.

    I would have been forever in tinkering through all this on my own.

  • agf says:

    ok, so I did this a long time ago and made the default 2G disk image…. but I’d like it to be larger now that I’m actually using it. I’ve installed XP Pro on the image… How can I increase the size of the disk image non-destructively? I know Workstation supports this, but Player doesn’t seem to… (right?)

    Thanks. :)

  • Simon says:

    Mac Operating systems can be run on windows/linux with PearPC http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/

  • phpnewb says:

    agf,
    I was able to install winXP sp2 with all the bells and whistles. it automagically grew the disk to 10gb (virtually) and physically it’s taking up about 5gb on the host.

  • Jeremy says:

    After faffing about with qemu for two days (no kqemu support, compiled sources had kqemu but qemu wouldn’t use it, argh!)I followed the instructions given and now have Windows 2000 SP4 running a dream. Thank you, thank you!

  • scherbenreich says:

    Hi there! One Problem with the Player: VMware Workstation changes the hosts display resolution when required, for example when full-screening a dos console on windows. does anyone know a way to force Player to do the same? This would definitly rock.

  • Alex says:

    I did not need to go through all these steps to install W2K VM.

    All I have to do was to run vmplayer and inserted 4 the set up floppies then the win2k CD

    I needed to download the VMware evaluation copy in tgz format and grep the windows.iso to install the mouse deiver and video driver.

  • Jack Doey says:

    No hack required. Download the free beta1 Vmware Server(registration required) at http://www.vmware.com/products/server/
    Create an VM there and play it on vmplayer or just use VMware server.

    OR

    Download evaluation 30 day version of VMware workstation.http://www.vmware.com/download/ws/eval.html
    Create VM’s and later run on vmplayer.

  • saurabh khandelwal says:

    is there any tool for freedos to clone the hard disk on a network?
    i need a tool to copy files on network using freedos.so is there any tool available.

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