Since I built this box back in November, it hasn't run windows
yet. This is partially due to the fact that I can't seem to get
windows to boot off of the slave 4.3 gig drive which I demoted it to
after getting a much larger disk for Linux (Actually I haven't really
tried, to be honest, and I seem to recall someone (was it here?)
commenting that windows couldn't be booted off of a slave drive).
I'm finding that I need to run windows in a few cases (read: games)
though, and one of my recent projects would be a bit easier if I had a
windows box to test things on until a few unix libraries are
developed. So I've been pondering using VMWare and ditching my
multiboot setup.
First, I'm not sure exactly how I should set up my disks. I've trashed
my FAT partition, so I'll definitely wipe my old installation of
windows clean. As I understand it, VMWare can run using a disk image
or a raw partition, with the raw option requiring much more experience
to set up (according to the documentation). Has anyone used the raw
partition option? The tech note seems very explicit in its discussion
about how to set it up; is it really any more complicated than
selecting the menu options which it recommends? Does the raw partition
option create a filesystem, or does it already expect one to be
present? And, if I should (for some reason) decide to switch back to a
multiboot setup, will the windows installation on the raw partition
transition neatly, or will I need to reinstall? How does VMWare handle
running windows off of slave drives? Can it conceal the drive's slave
status from windows?
How does VMWare compare, performance-wise, to multibooting? Ideally I'll be
using it for games, though I'd also like to run Cygnus' windows
development tools and such. I'm currently on a PIII 500 with 192 megs
of RAM; will VMWare drag my box to a halt if I try to work in windows
and Linux simultaneously, or can I probably get away with running
VMWare in one window while still heavily using my Linux box?
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