Microsoft Vista (RTM) on Debian using VMware workstation 5.0.0-13124

With the beta releases of Microsoft Vista, the Microsoft installer worked OK with VMware-workstation-5.0.0-13124 (with Debian as the host).

But now with the RTM "release" version Microsoft Vista English Disc 3707 January 2007 you may be surprised to get the following message:

A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing.
If you have a driver floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now.
Note: If the Windows installation media is in the CD/DVD drive,
you can safely remove it for this step.

If you persist (thinking that the CD device driver must already be loaded, as the Microsoft installer had just booted from the CD device, and after dilligently checking that the "Windows installation media" is indeed still in the CD drive), the following discouraging message is all you'll get for your trouble:

No device drivers were found.
Make sure the installation media contains the correct drivers,
then click OK.

You might indeed be asking yourself at this point:

"Why am I getting this kind of error message?
And are they seriously talking about the very same CD drive
I have just booted the Microsoft installation CD from?"

And you would be right to ask.

By entering the text of the above error message into the cheerful google search engine, we immediately find a helpful eWeek article.

Preparing the Virtual Machine

For Microsoft Vista, we need to:

• Pre-allocate the virtual drive as an IDE drive (not SCSI, this is important!) of size 16GB contiguous (not as 2GB separate files, this is important!).
• Set the virtual memory size to use in the virtual machine to 512MB (which is the minimum Microsoft will allow for Vista!).
• Configure your virtual machine with two CD drives, see the Two-CD Tango section for more details.

After that, we can intrepidly proceed with the installation, using the following instructions based on the eWeek article.

The Two-CD Tango Method of Installing Vista RTM on VMware

Steps to get Microsoft Vista installed as a VMware Workstation 5.0.0-13124 guest on Debian, using an ISO image:

• Extract the ISO image from the DVD using the following commands:

  cdrecord dev=ATA -scanbus
  /usr/bin/readcd -v dev=ATA:0,0,0 f=./Microsoft_Vista_English_Disc3707_January2007.iso

• Configure your virtual machine with two CD drives, the first pointed at a physical (real) CD drive, the second pointed at the above Microsoft Vista ISO image. Configure both drives to "connect at power on," and make sure the [  ] Legacy emulation box is not checked for your first CD drive.

• Boot up your virtual machine with no disc in the physical drive: it will boot from the Microsoft Vista ISO image.

• Once your virtual machine has booted, click "Next," and then "Install Vista." When you hit the error about Microsoft Vista not having a driver for your CD drive, press the Ctrl and Alt keys together, to get out of the virtual machine, and go to the tab for your virtual machine and right-click to bring up a menu, and select "Settings" from that menu. In the Settings, edit CD-ROM 1 to point at your Microsoft Vista ISO image, instead of having it as a physical drive. You don't need to change CD-ROM 2, you can leave it pointing to the ISO image.

• Click OK, and the Microsoft Vista installation should proceed normally.

Once Microsoft Vista has been installed in this way, the system won't recognize your CD drive. Switch your first drive back to point at a physical CD drive with legacy emulation switched off, and reboot Microsoft Vista. Wait for the OS to recognize and install a driver for the drive. Once the system has installed a driver for the first CD drive, you should be able to either burn a CD containing the VMware tools to get them installed, or repeat this two-CD Tango using the windows.iso (where to locate this ISO image is described below). After installing VMware tools, the VGA driver and sound driver should be working, and perhaps the networking driver.

Networking in Vista RTM

Try this driver from AMD. After you install it, you'll connect to the internet, and Microsoft will detect it and will cheerfully inform you that it is not supported. But it works OK.

Once you get the AMD networking driver installed, you may need to hunt down the proxy settings for your work environment: you can find them under "Control Panel", "Network and Internet", "Internet Options". In the "Internet Properties" dialog box, click on the "Connections" tab then click on the "LAN settings" button. In the "Local Area Network (LAN) Settings" dialog box (in the "Proxy Server" section) check the box "Use a proxy server for your LAN" and enter the Address and Port of your proxy server. Whew!

windows.iso -- home of the VMware Tools

Due to the CD troubles, you may find you have trouble installing the VMware tools. Normally the windows.iso file that VMware uses to provide the VMware tools install is installed in the following location, in the Linux host operating system:

/usr/lib/vmware/isoimages/windows.iso

During installation, it's extracted from VMware-workstation-5.0.0-13124.tar.gz and has the following size:

tar ztvf VMware-workstation-5.0.0-13124.tar.gz|grep windows.iso
-r--r--r-- 0/0        13467648 2005-03-23 03:54 vmware-distrib/lib/isoimages/windows.iso

It may be more convenient to burn this windows.iso image to CD-RW and install it from there into the Microsoft Vista guest.

To get the physical CD-ROM drive to function properly in the Vista guest, you can go through the following steps:

• Shut down the Microsoft Vista guest.
• Reconfigure the virtual machine so that there are no CD devices attached to it.
• Boot the Microsoft Vista guest, and remove all of the CD drivers using the Microsoft Vista "device manager" tool (find it in the "Control Panel").
• Shut down the Microsoft Vista guest and reconfigure the virtual machine so that a single physical CD (non-legacy) device is attached at power-on.
• Boot the guest up again, which causes Microsoft Vista to discover the physical CD drive and install a device driver for it.
• Check that the CD drive is working normally, e.g. by issuing an eject command from within Microsoft Vista.

This message (apparently harmless) is displayed during the booting of the Microsoft Vista guest, when connecting a non-legacy CD-ROM to Vista:

Your virtual machine has sent an ATAPI (CD-ROM) command that is supported
only when programming the drive via DMA. You will need to configure your
guest operating system to use DMA when communicating with DVD/CD-ROM devices.
Note that some operating systems will report DMA is available
without actually using it. In those cases, normal CD-ROM operations will
still be available, but special features will only be available if you
reconfigure the virtual device as a SCSI device.

To install any further software from ISO images, you'll still need to perform the same Two-CD Tango as described above.

So if you nerves are still good after all that excitement, you may want to explore further, but for now it's time to shut down the virtual machine: be sure not to accidentally "suspend" it, and choose shutdown. The default is now to suspend, which can be confusing.

-- PeterKnaggs - 02 Mar 2007
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