On Mon, 2003-06-23 at 05:38, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> Interesting - my experience is exactly the opposite, running various
> versions of NetBSD, FreeBSD, Debian, RedHat (and I gave up on Solaris)
> as guests on an XP host running VMware 4.  Of them all, NetBSD and
> FreeBSD were the ones which handled the bha emulation the best. 
> 
> Debian refused to install until I used an emulated IDE disk.  RH9
> failed to install properly until I used an emulated IDE disk, and
> failed to boot properly until I got rid of the bha emulation
> completely.  Solaris is a pain because it issues requests which blow
> up the emulated CDROM in vmware 4.  In passing, RH9 is a real pain,
> because I said that I wanted md5 passwords, but omitted to install the
> software to read md5 passwords (and it let me), so now I can't log in.
> Yet another installation for me.

Ok, so I tried an install again at work today. Once again, the 1.6.1
installer kernel failed to recognize the virtual IDE disk, although I
was able to install to a virtual SCSI disk by creating a new VM using
the wizard, setting the guest OS to be "Windows 2000 Advanced Server"
(which creates a virtual SCSI disk instead of an IDE disk) and then
booting the i386cd.iso within the guest. This time, no fatal errors
occurred.

It appears that the VMWare software doesn't understand SCSI "mode sense"
commands since the log contains errors like:

Jun 24 20:30:56: scsi0:0| SCSI-DEV0:0: Unsupported command *UNKNOWN
(0x1b)* issued. --ok
Jun 24 20:30:56: vcpu-0| SCSI DEVICE (scsi0:0): No transfer information
for *UNKNOWN (0x1b)* (0x1b)

And NetBSD complains about "fictitious geometry" as a result. It appears
to be harmless thus far, though.

- Julian

-- 
[    Julian C. Dunn <jdunn@aquezada.com> * <julian@dreaming.org>    ]
[   WWW: http://www.aquezada.com/staff/julian/  * PGP: 0xFDC205B9   ]
[      "sometimes you win, sometimes you lose / and most times      ]
[     you choose between the two" - carole king, "sweet seasons"    ]