I just spent the better part of the last two days troubleshooting this configuration... despite the apparent ease of the setup, you're humped if it doesn't work right away (which it didn't).
I've read many comments of people who got stuck at "Starting up ..." in Grub after choosing to boot their windows installation. I had the same problem.
Firstly I would definitely recommend using a CD boot image as described in the above setup in order not to accidentally boot (and thereby destroy!) your Linux installation. That's a step in the right direction, but it didn't solve the problem for everybody - including myself. On my thinkpad, VMware kept loading Grub bootloader instead of booting from the CD despite the fact that ISO image and BIOS had been configured correctly. However, I found a simple solution: As the VM loads (when you see the VMware logo), you can hit Esc. You have to get the timing right. If you do, it will bring up another boot menu. There you can explicitly choose CD-ROM. This fixed the problem for me and windows XP boots fine now.
EDIT: One big downside of my first fix was that you have to do that little reaction test every time VMware boots. And as you know Windows has to reboot quite frequently... So here's the better solution: This time hit F2 when VMware starts. This will bring up VMware's BIOS setup. I didn't even know VMware had its own BIOS but apparently it does. All you have to do is to move the CD-ROM drive up in the boot order. Voilá! VMware will now always try to boot from the CD-ROM drive first which is exactly what we want.
So bottom line is: Apart from the two OSes I already had to deal with, I now got two different BIOSes to worry about as well. Man, this virtualization thingy rocks!!!
his Favorites
Add him as a friend >
