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Philly ALT.NET Picking Up Steam >>
posted @ Thursday, September 27, 2007 2:46 PM
So, yesterday I decided to join the ranks of the
oh-so-sexy and try to get
VMWare Fusion running on my Macbook Pro, booting my current Windows XP
Bootcamp partition. Good news on this end. It couldn't have been any easier. Install Fusion, it discovers your partition, you boot it up, install some VMWare tools/drivers, reboot the VM and you are off to the races. To my great surprise, my Nortel VPN worked without a hitch inside the VM, and I could even continue to browse the net on the Mac OS as I pleased (when logged into this VPN on a "real" machine, you have no external access). At this point I do think I saw Heaven... but the near-death experience was what happened next.
Thrilled at the performance of Fusion, I was ready to do away with my Bootcamp partition, regain my full measly 100GB of drive space, and just run the VM whenever I needed to do my "dirty work." I am new to virtualization, and I wasn't sure if the VM I had created included everything from my Bootcamp partition, so I wanted to try the VM on another machine. When it comes to programming, I have a knack for not accepting the merely "great" - I want it all, and a creamsicle too. So, I install VMWare player on my Vista machine, intending to try to run my new VM on there and see if it behaves the same, or if in fact the Mac is using the Bootcamp partition as the VM, meaning there is more work for me to do before I can ditch Bootcamp.
Install went swell (a bit slow), and I was prompted for a required reboot. As the machine is booting, I suddenly get a
BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH! My first ever on my Vista machine. The error declares there has been an INTERNAL_POWER_FAILURE. I was mortified. I thought my hardware had fried, and my machine is less than 6 months old. Reboot after reboot, safe mode, last successful configuration - all failed with the BSOD. I hoped that this had to be some strange bug with VMware. I turned back to my Macbook for comfort and googled a bit. Turns out that
VMware, Vista, and various wireless devices do not get along. I have a Logitech wireless mouse. I unplugged every thing from every USB port, aside from my keyboard, and rebooted... no BSOD. I immediately uninstalled the VMWare player, re-plugged in my peripherals, and everything has been fine since. I've also read a few posts stating that if you unplug the offending peripherals and make it through the FIRST successful reboot, that you can plug them back in and reboot just fine from that point on. I was too shaken by the experience to try that, and I took it as a sign from the PC (or Mac) gods that I was moving too fast, and needed to take my time and count my blessings!