Creating floppy boot disks under VMWare

I am in the process of shifting my server from running Fedora Core + VMWare server into VMWare ESXi.

I’ll cover the gory details of that in another post. At this point, all you need to know is that ESXi doesn’t support IDE disks, only SCSI disks. Most of my VMs have IDE disks. Sigh.

After crawling the net for a while I found some extremely useful posts covering what needs to be done:

http://hamed.dk/home/53-vm-ide2scsi and http://blog.creonfx.com/linux/howto-convert-vmware-windows-xp-ide-disk-to-lsilogic-scsi.

One of the first things that must be done is to install the LsiLogic driver. I opted for the WHQL 1.20.18.00.

The problem then is to upgrade the BIOS. I must admit I am not exactly sure if that is a required step, but I did it anyway. Why is it a problem? Well, a set of files need to be placed on a bootable floppy drive. And my lappy doesn’t have a floppy slot.

Luckily there is a way. Open the settings for the machine.

Add a Floppy. Make sure you select to create a blank floppy image.

Specify a filename and do NOT connect at power on.

Start the VM. Once booted, connect the disk.

Open windows explorer, right-click the A: disk and select Format

Make sure to create a startup disk.

Click start and the process is over in a few seconds.

Now you can put the files from the LsiLogic BIOS package on the disk. If you are running VMWare Workstation you can simply drag them from the host machine into the VM. Note that you should NOT copy LSI’s command.com. It simply didn’t work well for me; something about a corrupt image. Just take all the other files.

Shut down the VM, open settings, select the floppy and have it connect on power on.

Start the VM again. It will now boot from the floppy assuming your VM BIOS is set like mine. Press F2 during booting and make sure:

If you made any changes, exit and save changes.

A familiar screen…

Run the install-command and ponder which option suits you. I chose (a).

On the next screen, I chose (t)

Then quit your way out.

To be quite honest I don’t think this worked as well as I hoped. At least when I do it again and again I manage to see something about “base address not found”. Maybe it works only once? Or maybe this step isn’t required.

At any rate, I thought it was a nifty way to solve the problem with creating a boot disk under vmware when I needed one. Or at least thought I did.

–Jesper Högström