How-to: VMware player modification
24th Oct 2005, 16:44 GMT
Last week the free VMware player was released. It lets you run virtual machines, but not create them. [Faileas] contributed today’s how-to for creating your own virtual machines. Programs required to carry out hack: Copy of VMware Player Browser appliance or another virtual machine(browser appliance is the smallest one, by size, and thus I am using that) Notepad or other text editor ISO image or CD/floppy of FreeDOS (I’m using the ripcord distribution) or MSDOS 7.1 would work as well, but i haven’t tried it yet. Replacement OS (must have SCSI HDD support) Once you’ve downloaded the browser appliance or whatever image you intend to use, the first step is to open up and edit the browser-appliance.vmx file. I used notepad for this, though any text editor should do. I’d reccomend changing the settings as needed, though these are what i suggest. Change the value of memsize to 64 from 256. For most operating systems this is sufficient and you can change this later as needed. Part 1: Using an ISO The image i am using has been setup to use the physical CD-Rom drive of my system. Not really desireable when you want to install from a downloaded ISO. While using daemontools, or a similar CD mounting program is an option, a more elegant method would be to use VMware player’s own ability to read ISOs. At this point i suggest saving and making a copy of the browser-appliance.vmx file, since it might be desireable to use a physical CD-Rom drive at a later point of time. To do this replace: ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect" ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw" with: ide1:0.fileName = "C:\targetcd.iso" ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image" Where C:\targetcd.iso is the location of the disk you intend to use. Once this is done, save the edited vmx file and run it. Part 2: Removing the current OS Now, at the startup screen press escape and choose to boot from the CD drive at the next screen. If all goes well, you should be greeted by where you should choose to boot from CDrom. From there choose to boot to the second option “FreeDOS ** FAT32. At the next screen pick the first option, to “boot with el toreto cd rom driver” (default) and then the second option, to run FreeDOS from CD command prompt. Now the fun part… Type in Fdisk and press enter. Choose to enable large disk support and press enter. Looks familar? Now select the third option to “Delete partition”. and the fourth option at the next screen, to “Delete a Non-DOS Partition”… this is the point of no return (well almost). Select the only partion, and delete it. Press escape to go back to the main screen, and select the first option, to create a new partition. It’s the first option on both that and the next screen. At the third screen, it will ask you if you want to make a partion that is the maximum size possible. Press Y and enter. You can resize it later with whatever OS you are using. Press escape until you go back to the main screen and the VM reboots. Part 3: Installing a new OS At this point, we have a broken bootloader and a hdd that needs formatting… perfect for a new OS! Shut down the VM “player->troubleshoot->shutdown and exit” and open up the browser-appliance.vmx file again and edit “ide1:0.fileName = “C:\targetcd.iso”” to point to the installation CD of the new OS. If its a physical CD, you will have to edit the ide1:0.filename and ide1:0.deviceType to their original values. Boot up. Choose to boot from CD (you can’t boot from CD anyway, GRUB’s broken after what we did) and reinstall. Most modern OSes would allow you to format to whatever format is needed. This step is based on whatever OS you use, so no screenshots of that. I ended up installing DOS (it’s a perfect, simple OS to use as a basis for further things) Conclusion There you have it, a perfectly usable VMware image using nothing but VMware player and FreeDOS. One limitation is that you cannot use this disk image to install an OS without SCSI support. Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments © 2005 Weblogs, Inc.