[vmware] Using physical disk/partition

Hello,

I am using vmware server 1.0.4.56528 and I just wanted to know how harmful that feature can be. I want to use vmware to test distros on a spare partition.

VMWare warns me about using physical drives instead of image files, and overall, it seems a really inmature feature. I can't figure out how the partitions are ordered, I just get a list with partition 0 to partition 7, the ordering seems not to be the same of fdisk -l, and some of the partitions have the same size, so, I have no clue at all which is each one, and I don't want to risk foobaring a important partition.

If anyone knows anything about this, it would probe helpful.

Thanks in advance for any tip.

Quote:

---

test distros on a spare partition

---

In general, using one partition on an active disk is probably not a good idea. If you can't give the whole disk to VMWare, you are probably better off making this spare partition XFS in the host OS and let VMWare create a VMDK on it for the guest OS.

And if you not sure about it, using a VMDK will be much safer.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by HROAdmin26

In general, using one partition on an active disk is probably not a good idea. If you can't give the whole disk to VMWare, you are probably better off making this spare partition XFS in the host OS and let VMWare create a VMDK on it for the guest OS.

And if you not sure about it, using a VMDK will be much safer.

---

That's the feeling I had. Thanks for confirming it.

The main reason I want to do it that way, is to install distros for testing purposes from my Gentoo environment, so then I can boot into them normaly if I wish. But using that method wouldn't be of any help for that purpose.

So, I basically have three options:

-buy a cheap harddrive for this, which is probably the best bet
-use an image file, which wouldn't serve my purpose
-don't use vmware and test as usual, by rebooting once and again

Thanks for the response.