Installing Windows XP SP3 in VMware Workstation 7.1 on Ubuntu 10.04

I had decided to stay with VMware Workstation 7.1 for a while longer, adopting a wait-and-see strategy toward VirtualBox and whatever other virtualization developments might be underway.  A couple of years had passed since I had first installed Windows XP on VMware Workstation in Ubuntu.  My old virtual machines (VMs) were creaking and malfunctioning.  It was time to create a new WinXP VM.

I had obtained mixed results from efforts to use VMware Converter to build VMs from existing WinXP installations or other sources.  I decided to build a fresh installation, installing XP within a newly created VM.  I had already installed VMware Workstation.  Now I started it as root user by typing "sudo vmware," and then I went into Ubuntu's Applications > Accessories > Terminal.  In Workstation, I went into Edit > Preferences and adjusted the settings that would apply to all VMs, some of which could only be set by root.  In the Preferences > Workspace tab, I went with the default settings for the most part.  For the default location of my VMs, I chose a partition on a separate hard drive for better performance.  In the Display tab, I selected the three Autofit options.  I selected all of the Updates options.  In the Memory tab, I left about 1.5GB of RAM for the system; the rest was for VMs.

When I was done with the settings, I killed that session and restarted VMware as a normal user.  I created a new VM with these characteristics:

• I started with a 40GB independent, persistent SCSI VM, but ran into some problems when I tried to shrink it, and ultimately had to start over.  Since it was easier to grow a VM than to shrink it, I decided on 20GB to start.  Although I initially created this as a preallocated space, it seemed that clones (which I made from time to time as backup, as the installation and tweaking process went along) would default to being non-preallocated, and I decided that was actually better until things got settled, because non-preallocated drives were smaller and therefore easier to clone and to back up.
• A 4GB independent, persistent IDE virtual drive, within this VM, for the paging file (VM > Settings > Hardware > Add).  This, I discovered, was best created after WinXP was installed.  Otherwise, WinXP was quite capable of brainlessly installing itself into this little partition and leaving the 20GB partition unused, thereby providing yet another reason to start over from the beginning.  Also, this drive was best created when the VM was powered down; only a SCSI (not preferred) drive could be created while the machine was powered up.  Note also that, as soon as you start down this path, Workstation may create a miniature version of a file for such a hard drive, even if you then abort the process -- in which case your later attempts to create that file may trigger strange results, until you investigate and delete any such runt file.
• 1.5GB RAM.  I had opted for 32-bit Ubuntu and WinXP after numerous previous hassles with 64-bit systems.  The discovery of PAE-enabled kernels meant I could go above the ordinary 32-bit limit of 4GB of RAM, so I was comfortable with this 1.5GB allocation for a single VM.  I could have gone higher, but I had almost never reached the point of using even this much.
• One single-core CPU.
• Based on my own usage, I set "Don't automatically connect" for floppy, USB devices,  or printer.
• Power:  enter full screen mode after powering on; close after powering off.
• Shared folders:  always enabled, map as network drive, make read/write only those that needed to be written to in Windows.
• No AutoProtect.
• Guest isolation:  enable drag and drop; enable copy and paste; don't enable VMCI.
• VMware Tools Updates:  use application default (currently update automatically).

Then I inserted the Windows XP CD and installed Windows XP, using a slipstreamed CD with Service Pack 3 (SP3) on it.  In my first attempt at this, I had to deal with the problem of making the VM boot from the CD.  I had just learned how to do this.  First, in Ubuntu's Terminal, I typed "sudo gedit [path][filename].vmx," for the .vmx file pertaining to this VM, and then I went to the end of that file and added bios.bootDelay = "10000" and saved the edited file.  This gave me a ten-second delay on VMware's splash screen.  So then I had time, on reboot, to read the options and choose F2 for BIOS setup.  In BIOS setup, I chose Boot, moved the CD-ROM drive up to be first in the boot sequence, and then hit F10 to save and close.  Then I installed WinXP.  The process was completely automatic, this time; apparently the latest version of VMware Workstation was able to detect my settings from the underlying Ubuntu installation.

Once WinXP was done with its basic installation process, I right-clicked on the VMware Tools icon in the system tray (i.e., the lower-right-hand corner of the WinXP desktop), chose "Open VMware Tools," and selected all three items in the Options tab, and then closed that.  To get the Windows desktop to stretch all the way across the monitor, I used VMware's View > Stretch Guest (using the menu at the top of the screen), and then returned it to View > Autofit Guest, and for some reason that did it.  I had to map my network drives after listing them in Workstation's VM > Settings > Options > Shared Folders.  Then I turned to the process of tweaking my WinXP installation.  There are some additional VM-related notes in my post on that.  When I tried to open a PDF file from within the VM, I got a Default Host Application error message.  Another post discusses that problem.

I wanted to use Acronis TrueImage to make periodic images throughout the installation process, so as to capture each working state of the system in a single snapshot.  On a standalone WinXP installation, that would have been just a matter of inserting the Acronis CD and making the backup to a separate partition.  In the VM context, though, Acronis was only willing to recognize only those partitions that were defined as part of the VM.  What I did instead, then, was to power down the VM, use Nautilus to copy the entire VM's folder to an NTFS drive, boot Acronis, and make an image of that VM folder.  (I also made a .zip of it in 7zip, just in case.)

To get the system to pause before loading Windows within VMware, so that I would have time to make a decision to adjust the BIOS or choose boot devices, I edited the individual virtual machine as described in a previous post.  Basically, I set Workstation's VM > Settings > Hardware tab > CD/DVD > "Connect at power on" and "Use a physical device" (though I was intrigued by the "Use ISO image" option).  In Terminal, I typed "sudo gedit [path][filename].vmx," for the .vmx file pertaining to this VM; and at the end of that file I added a line that said this:

    bios.bootDelay = "10000"

and that bought me ten seconds instead of one or two, when that vmware logo came up.

*** NOTE ***

At this point, I stopped developing this post.  Several other system issues had to be taken care of first, and those were superseded by non-system tasks.  When I returned to this post several months later, my purpose was just to close it down.  I had decided, by that time, to stop working on VMware within Ubuntu.  The following fragments are the other notes I had left over, in incomplete form, when I ceased working on this post.

Fragmentary notes continue as follows:

*  *  *  *  *


At some point in the process, I started getting an error message when I was trying to shut down the WinXP VM:

End Program - VMwareUser.exe
This program is not responding.

I did a search and found that virtually nobody was having this problem.  That was not a good sign.  A different search suggested that lots of people were having problems of one sort or another with VMwareUser.exe.  That was not a good sign either.  I didn't have an answer for this problem at this time.

After adding another program, Windows Explorer began flashing, refreshing itself every couple of seconds, in what appeared to be a different network drive problem.  I have written up the process of solving that in a separate post.

After tweaking the WinXP installation, I began adding programs.  I installed Copernic Desktop Search as one of those programs.  VMware Workstation treated my data drives as network drives, and Copernic regarded network drives as a sign that I was in a workplace, so I could not use their free version with VMware.  I downloaded their professional version ($40 to buy) and used it on a trial basis.  It was not able to save its index to a network drive.  Its index, I heard somewhere, would be about 10% of the total size of the files being indexed.  So if I had 100GB worth of files, I would have a 10GB index.  I definitely did not want that kind of monster sitting on my drive C.  But there seemed to be no alternative.  I decided to add a third virtual hard drive (30GB max, not preallocated) to the VM, made it drive Q, and told Copernic to save its index there.  When Copernic was done with its indexing, that drive

The only tweak that didn't seem to work was the one where I went into Internet Explorer and tried to save its Temporary Internet Files folder to some drive other than C.  It wouldn't save to a network drive.  But it also wouldn't even save to the little drive that I had created to serve as a paging file.  Possibly there wasn't enough disk space available for it there.

In the interests of improving performance, I worked through a VMware document on that subject.