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VMWare Fusion beta 4 on hackintosh boots windows partition like bootcamp

Jemm
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Jemm
Jemm
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I've just seen VMWare Fusion Beta 4 running on a modest hackintosh using a slow Celeron cpu with 1 Gig of Ram.

 

VMWare booted the native XP installed on it's own partition as if it were a bootcamp on a real Mac. Very impressive.

 

I am amazed at the speed that windows is running as a guest on OS X.

 

XP apps can run in Unity mode where just the app runs in it's own window and the rest of xp is hidden.

 

3D graphics are slow and there is only support for DirectX 8.1.

 

Some applications sense that the system has changed and want to re-activate. Beyond that no problems.

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sarahbau
sarahbau
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What was even more impressive to me, is I didn't even need to edit any configuration file in a text editor for it to work, like in Parallels. VMWare just found the partition that had Windows installed, and booted from it.

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sarahbau
sarahbau
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how did u guys get vmware fusion to boot from the windows partition??

 

it only gives me the option to use a virtual HD

 

is it because the partition is in NTFS?

 

or maybe its because my partition is vista?

 

It might not support Vista yet. I'm not sure. I just opened VMWare Fusion, selected Boot Camp, and told it to boot. It thought about it for a few minutes, and I figured it would eventually say "no boot camp found" or something, but to my surprise, it eventually started booting Windows.

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Jemm
Jemm
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Same here; The machine I saw it on had XP on it's own hard drive.

 

It's much easier to use separate drives in my opinion, that way you can use the BIOS to select the startup drive rather than messing around with LILO or another boot manager.

 

 

Anyway, just let VMWare boot bootcamp and amazingly it worked.

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Cyman
Cyman
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What matters though is to know if you guys have BootCamp installed on your machines. Did you install Windows over BootCamp or did the Windows installations you were able to boot like this via VMWare already resided on the hard drives?

Reading what Jemm says, this seems to be the case, but I wonder why I cannot choose this option with VMWare or where I can find it. I connected one of my external hard drives where a Windows XP installation is residing on, but I don't get such an option from VMWare nor could I find out hot to get it/where to find it!

Please enlighten those like me who weren't that lucky with a detailed explanation of what you did and where to find the mentioned options (maybe with screenshots - I really like to see where I should look for this).

Thank you guys.

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sarahbau
sarahbau
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Neither of us actually have Boot Camp installed since you can't install it on a Hackintosh. I already had Windows XP installed on a second hard drive. When I launched VMWare Fusion for the first time, the default option was to boot from Boot Camp. I'm not sure if it's the same with Jemm, but I did nothing at all to get it to work. I just decided to try to boot from the "Boot Camp" option, thinking it wouldn't work since I don't actually have Boot Camp, but it found the XP partition on its own. I'm not sure if the reason it didn't work for you is because it was on a FW drive, or what.

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Jemm
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You are correct sarahbau.

 

To be very clear:

 

Bootcamp was not installed

 

OS X was installed on a drive all by itself

 

The OS X drive was removed and a new drive was installed onto which XP was installed.

 

Then both drives were put back in with the OS X drive being the boot drive.

 

When VMWare started it had "bootcamp" in the list of virtual machines.

 

That's all there was to it.

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Cyman
Cyman
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What is strange is that on a real Mac this doesn't seem to work. I would like to know from Mac users (not Hackintosh) if they also have this option. I have three external disks, connected via eSATA to my MBP. One of the disks contains two XP installations. Anyway I don't have this option.

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Azoro2000
Azoro2000
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I've just seen VMWare Fusion Beta 4 running on a modest hackintosh using a slow Celeron cpu with 1 Gig of Ram.

 

VMWare booted the native XP installed on it's own partition as if it were a bootcamp on a real Mac. Very impressive.

 

I am amazed at the speed that windows is running as a guest on OS X.

 

XP apps can run in Unity mode where just the app runs in it's own window and the rest of xp is hidden.

 

3D graphics are slow and there is only support for DirectX 8.1.

 

Some applications sense that the system has changed and want to re-activate. Beyond that no problems.

 

It happened the same thing for me but... Is it my winxp partition going to be "spoiled" in any way? I mean, is it Fusion going to write on it? Like new drivers or things like that? Or I just after running the boot camp + fusion I can just run my winxp partion in "real mode" without any problem?

 

As of today I didn't push on the "run" boot camp button, just to be sure...

 

Hope I made myself clear, English is not my mother language :pirate2:

Thanks a lot!

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sarahbau
sarahbau
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This didn't work for my boyfriend for some reason. I haven't tried it myself on his computer, but he says BootCamp shows up, but if he tries to boot from it, it just sits there thinking indefinitely.

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Takuro
Takuro
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I've got a bit of a dilemma.

 

1) The VMware installer gives me a kernel panic around where it says "Finishing installation... running installer script"

 

2) VMware keeps bitching about not being activated. When I enter the serial their site gives me, it refuses to take it. It tells me I was supposed to enter the serial during the installer.

 

I used Pacifist to force it to install. There's no way for me to activate it now, since I can't run the normal installer and get to the "Serial" stage of the installer... and I'm wondering to myself "why the hell are they making me activate a piece of beta software that's readily available on their site?" "Why the heck is there even an option to activate post-installation if it just tells you that you were supposed to enter the serial during their crappy installer that always crashes before you can enter a serial in the first place."

 

The serial is 00P0P-0242H-02H0M-4852M. Every time I register its the same. This is so stupid and pointless.

 

ARRRGG. I swear, these people may be smart but they lack common sense!!!

 

Anybody know how to (and I can't believe I'm saying this, since its a FREE beta) crack VMware?

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BJMoose
BJMoose
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I tried the beta 4 version of VMWare as a result of reading this thread. I've not used it before, but I do have some experience with Parallels both on my Mac Pro and my Hackintosh. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to only talk about the Hackintosh since I don't like experimenting with beta software on my Mac Pro.

 

I too installed VMWare and it saw my WindowsXP partition (on the same physical drive as my OSX86 partition) as a Bootcamp Partition. Without reading anything first (which has always been how I learn) I hit the setup button and it set up a virtual drive without much problem. Installing VM Tools does make a world of difference on my system. After restarting the system, Windows booted up as a virtual machine and most things ran okay. Of course any programs that needed to reference other drives for data, couldn't (to be expected) and my adobe software saw it as a different machine so I needed to re-activate it.

 

My first observations are that on my machine (see specs in my signature) VMWare runs considerably slower that Parallels 3 (latest version with 3d support) with more resources available to it than the max allowed by parallels (2gb ram vs. 1.5gb). However, Parallels doesn't allow me to create a virtual machine from my WinXP partition (at least I haven't figured that out yet) and VMW does, so the plus goes to VMWare for that. As I said, Parallels is faster, so they get the plus there, but I would not say that either is ready for primetime system hog software like editing or some of the major games (not a gamer so I don't have any real life experience with that).

 

The plus I gave to VMWare dwindles a bit because that virtual machine it creates based on what it sees as the bootcamp partition is not a totally virtual machine (at least what I've grown accustomed to). In other words, things that you do within the VM affect the actual partition. As a test, I deleted some of the icons on the quicktask bar in the VM and when I rebooted into my real windows partition, they were gone there too. The loaded drivers didn't seem to affect anything, but I don't want my VM's affecting my real machine. Maybe, as with Parallels, I just don't know yet how to create a real virtual machine from the partition (or if that's even possible).

 

For those who want to know, I create Ghost Images of my partitions in clean condition and reload the image before I test something that might conflict (like VMWare with Parallels etc.). So there aren't any traces of Parallels left on this machine. Also, Bootcamp was never on the machine as from what I understand, it doesn't play well with Hackintosh. I'd be interested in hearing comments and suggestions for this VM noob.

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cabron
cabron
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I've got a bit of a dilemma.

 

1) The VMware installer gives me a kernel panic around where it says "Finishing installation... running installer script"

 

2) VMware keeps bitching about not being activated. When I enter the serial their site gives me, it refuses to take it. It tells me I was supposed to enter the serial during the installer.

 

I used Pacifist to force it to install. There's no way for me to activate it now, since I can't run the normal installer and get to the "Serial" stage of the installer... and I'm wondering to myself "why the hell are they making me activate a piece of beta software that's readily available on their site?" "Why the heck is there even an option to activate post-installation if it just tells you that you were supposed to enter the serial during their crappy installer that always crashes before you can enter a serial in the first place."

 

The serial is 00P0P-0242H-02H0M-4852M. Every time I register its the same. This is so stupid and pointless.

 

ARRRGG. I swear, these people may be smart but they lack common sense!!!

 

Anybody know how to (and I can't believe I'm saying this, since its a FREE beta) crack VMware?

 

seccond here :D

i have the same damn problem as you has.

 

normal install = kernel panic at the end

pacifist install = crazy asking of serials

 

i haven't found yet a solution to fix it or just stoping the kernel panic at the end of installation.

if i got some real good way to go i will post here.

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