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VMWare: How to use your hackintosh real windows partition!


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I post here a really easy to follow guide that will make you eventually boot from your windows partition under vmware if:

you are using a dual boot XP/OS X normally booting with the darwin bootloader

you have them on the same HD

VMWare is not seeing the windows partition as a "BootCamp" partiton.

 

1) Install VMWare.

 

2) Open terminal and type:

 

sudo fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0

 

where 0 is the number of your hd where you have the two systems.

type:

 

print

 

here you will have a list of your partitions. Please proceed ONLY if you see the HFS+ partition flagged with the * symbol.

type:

 

flag X

 

where X is the number of the windows partition you want to use with vmware.

 

type:

 

write

 

type "y" and enter.

 

Do not exit fdisk as you will need it just in a few minutes.

 

3) launch vmware and you'll be pleased to see that you now have a bootcamp boot option. Follow the program instructions.

 

4) When you have finished to install everything and play a bit with the new toy exit VMWare shutting the machine down.

 

5) Go to the open terminal window and type:

 

flag X

where X is the number of the partition the was flagged before you changed it (the HFS+ boot partition).

 

type:

 

write

y

exit

 

6) Open vmware and verify that the BootCamp boot option is still there (as it was for me).

 

7) Try to reboot mac os (it should be all ok!

 

DONE

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Thanks a million for this post; I knew there had to be a simple way to get this done! However, I'm not quite out of the woods yet. I installed Windows/OS X/Linux, in that order. Linux installed grub, which apparently did something weird to the Darwin bootloader. Grub right now is set to boot:

 

Linux: hda0,2

Windows: hda0,0

OS X: hda0,1

 

When you select OS X from Grub's menu, it then boots into the Darwin bootloader, which in turn gives me the option of booting OS X or Windows.

 

The result of all of this is that when I follow the instructions you posted, I *do* get the option in Fusion to boot from Boot Camp Partition (yay!) but when I actually try to do so I get this:

 

----

GRUB Loading stage1.5

 

GRUB loading, please wait...

Error 17

----

 

I take it that VMware is trying to boot grub, which sees the filesystem as some kind of weird VMware virtual thing and gets confused, and pukes with an error 17. My question, therefore: do you know how to fix this? I will happily lose the ability to boot into linux and reinstall the darwin bootloader on MBR if only I could figure out how...

 

Help is much appreciated.

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

Hi, I try that to use my previously xp installation on fusion but it doesn't work

 

When I do "write" after flag the windows partition it says me :

fdisk:*1> write

Device could not be accessed exclusively.

A reboot will be needed for changes to take effect. OK? [n]

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  • 3 weeks later...

Using Leopard 10.5.1. disk1s1 = linux, disk1s2 = osx, disk1s3 = XP. disk1s5 is my data partition. Lilo is in the MBR as my bootloader.

 

With VMWare Fusion 1.1 I was unable to get anything going. Choosing a boot camp partition and run or settings cause Fusion to try to create a VM profile but it never finished and after killing Fusion the VM wasn't runnable. Fusion 1.0 worked better, I was able to create a VM profile.

 

I set the Windows partition active, but on starting Fusion it ran Lilo from the hard drive's MBR (and failed). I finally followed someone else's advice and downloaded a SuperGrub ISO and set the VMs CD drive to "Use Disk Image". When I started the VM I pressed f2 to access the "BIOS" and set it to boot from CD. Once SuperGrub started I was able to choose to boot the windows partition.

 

Works fine, though I don't have access to the data partition (disk1s5, a fat32 partition) from within the VM.

 

It's all a bit of a hassle. If it were really important for me to have a windows VM for certain apps I'd probably just install Windows in a regular VM and forget about getting the "boot camp" partition running in VMWare. It's doable at least..

 

Also, now that I have a VM set up, I can run it with Fusion 1.1. I just can't get it set up in the first place with 1.1. 1.0 seems to be necessary to start, at least for me.

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  • 1 month later...

If you are getting a b0 error, it usually means that Fusion found your 'boot camp' before you were able to set the Windows partition as active.

 

To get around this:

 

1. Make sure Fusion is not running.

2. Using Finder, go to /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion and trash all of the folders (you should see Boot Camp and Helper)

3. continue with step 2 sroddy's tutorial (post 1 in this thread)

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I installed VMware Fusion 1.1 on Leopard and it ran my windows xp on another hard disk like a charm. It detected it as a Bootcamp partition automatically. No settings required at all.

 

just one thing: I could only found the C drive in the xp disk which I formatted to 3 partitions. Is it possible to get the other 2 appear as well?

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i have not found a way to have the drive be seen like real drives.

 

but, vmware allows you to add Shared Folders. you can add fat32 drives or even mac drives and folders. then while in windows you can give the shares a drive letter so the drives always show up.

 

only problem is when you boot into windows directly the system takes a long time to startup.

i think it is trying to find the shares and not finding them because vmware is not running.

 

it works, just not the best.

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I installed VMware Fusion 1.1 on Leopard and it ran my windows xp on another hard disk like a charm. It detected it as a Bootcamp partition automatically. No settings required at all.

 

just one thing: I could only found the C drive in the xp disk which I formatted to 3 partitions. Is it possible to get the other 2 appear as well?

Sure, but you need to do it manually you can use vmware-vdiskmanager to make the VMDKs of your Physical partitions, then with a text editor add them to your VMX file.

 

Is it possible to get this working with vista? I am using VMWare Fusion 1.1 with Tiger 10.4.11

 

Thanks

I ran Vista on my AMD with 10.4.10 without problems.

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Hi, thanks for your reply, but I have not been able to get it working with Vista; I always get the b0 error, and when I reboot after following the above steps, the Vista bootloader asks for the DVD, saying winload.exe is corrupted. I seem to get this very frequently if I change any active partition, so to save hassle, I am using the Vista bootloader at the moment. Will it still be possible to use Vista in VMware? Would it help if I downloaded 1.0?

 

Thanks

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I tried to follow this guide but right after I type:

sudo fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0

 

I got this:

 

fdisk: could not open MBR file /usr/standalone/i386/boot0: No such file or directory

Enter 'help' for information

 

I could never get to the partition list for disk0, on which my Mac OS X and WinXP are installed.

 

Anybody has idea about this? Thanks!

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  • 2 weeks later...
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