July 18, 2008 2:52 pm (permalink)

Booting SuSE 11 inside VMware

Two weeks ago, I got a new laptop and set it up to dual-boot both Windows Vista (which I need for work) and SuSE 11. Inside Vista, I also installed VMware and made it boot my existing Linux installation.

Using raw disk partitions in VMware is a bit dangerous and you have to be really careful when setting this up. Here's how I configured it - and it turned out to work really great:

  • First of all, make sure you select individual partitions in VMware and not the entire disk. Make sure you don't select the partition containing your host Windows operating system. This ensures that VMware doesn't let the guest operating system access that partition, so you can't accidentally boot or mount it - which'd result in severe data corruption and possible loss of all data on the disk.

  • Before booting the first time inside VMware, you need to enable SCPM and create two profiles - I'm using gondor (running natively) and isengard (running inside VMware). In yast, go to System / Profile Manager, active it there and make sure to set both Switch Mode and Boot Mode to Save Changes.

    Then do 

    scpm copy default gondor
scpm switch gondor
scpm save
    on the command line. This'll save your current configuration into the gondor profile. After that, do a 
    scpm copy gondor isengard
scpm switch isengard
scpm save

  • Edit /boot/grub/menu.list, replace the SuSE 11 with Gondor, add PROFILE=gondor to the kernel command line and make sure you're using root=/dev/disk/by-uuid: 

    title Gondor
    root (hd0,2)
    kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/b39b72d4-ac4e-4385-b9a3-08ca81b4638f splash=silent PROFILE=gondor showopts vga=791
    initrd /boot/initrd

title Mordor
    rootnoverify (hd0,2)
    chainloader (hd0,0)+1

  • Copy /boot/grub/stage2 to /boot/grub/state2-isgengard and also copy /boot/grub/menu.list to /boot/grub/menu-isengard.lst. Edit /boot/grub/menu-isengard.lst, remove the Mordor entry and replace Gondor with isengard. This configuration will be used when booting inside VMware: 

    title Isengard
    root (hd1,2)
    kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/b39b72d4-ac4e-4385-b9a3-08ca81b4638f splash=silent showopts PROFILE=isengard
    initrd /boot/initrd

  • Edit /etc/fstab and use /dev/disk/by-uuid everywhere instead of /dev/disk/by-id or using the raw device. My /etc/fstab looks like this: 

    /dev/disk/by-uuid/b39b72d4-ac4e-4385-b9a3-08ca81b4638f /                    ext3       acl,user_xattr        1 1
/dev/mapper/cr_sda6  /home                ext3       acl,user_xattr,noauto 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/13aee839-dccc-4999-a977-6168d109dae1 /work                ext3       acl,user_xattr        1 2

    This is important since your hard disk will have different physical devices when running inside VMware, so /dev/disk/by-id will be different.

  • Now you can reboot your system into Windows.

  • In VMware, create a really small (10 MB is fine) virtual disk in addition to your physical hard disk. Double check that you're using individual partitions and the partition containing your Windows host operating system is not selected.

  • Boot inside VMware, press F2 to go to BIOS setup, select the virtual hard disk as primary boot device, save and exit. Press Esc to go to the boot menu, select CD-ROM as temporary boot device and boot off the SuSE 11 installation DVD, select Rescue System

  • Once in the rescue system, /dev/hda should be the virtual hard disk and /dev/hdb your physical one. Manually install grub into the MBR of the virtual disk and make it use /boot/grub/stage2-isengard and /boot/grub/menu-isengard.lst. You have to do that inside the grub shell, by using appropriate root and install commands - this is a bit dangerous since it could make your system unbootable, so check the manual.

    Note that we only need the MBR in the virtual hard disk - the boot loader in it will load /boot/grub/stage2-isengard from your physical hard disk. Grub encodes the path of the configuration file (/boot/grub/menu-isengard.lst) in the stage2, that's why we're using a custom one.

    This setup is a bit complicated, but it ensures that you don't accidentally boot Linux with the wrong profile.

  • Remove the SuSE 11 installation DVD and reboot.

With the two different boot loaders, you'll always boot your Linux with the correct SCPM profile. The SCPM profiles make sure you can have different configurations when running natively and inside VMware. For instance, your /etc/X11/xorg.conf will be different in each scenario and you may also have different network settings.

I'm even using different host names and different IP addresses for both configurations - the one "machine" is called gondor.trier.ximian.com (192.168.3.8) and the other one is called isengard.trier.ximian.com (192.168.3.9). You may also add additional files / services to SCPM to also save things like /etc/issue and /etc/motd, for instance.

SCPM also takes care of the different X11 configuration - when running natively, I'm using a multi-headed setup with an external monitor - and in Vista, I move the VMware window into the external monitor and use full-screen mode there. This means that I have Vista on my laptop's main display and my GNOME session on the external monitor - really awesome !

On Isengard, I'm also using Samba to mount /work/mordor from Windows - I'm using a separate host-only network (VMnet1) for that. To make this work on Vista, create a host-only network (in addition to bridging the ethernet card), assign it a static IP address (I'm using 192.168.3.0/24 for my "real" network and 192.168.8.0/24 for the host-only one) and set the default gateway to that address (address 192.168.8.1 / netmask 255.255.255.0 / gateway 192.168.8.1) - this'll fix the "Unidentified Network" problem in Vista.

Posted by martin at July 18, 2008 2:52 pm.