A stupid Linux / VMware question

Moving to the Linux section....they should be able to help you out.

you're installing inside of VMWare, correct? the warnings going to be coming up regardless, because it's supposed to. remember, it's an entire computer inside the VMWare

you're fine, its just going to format the virtual hard drive. make sure you back up any files you need on the virtual hard drive first!

I will ease you mind on this. Your hard drive will NOT be affected by formatting the VMware partition. Basically, the VMware partition is nothing more than a self-contained operating system within a folder on your actual hard drive. Whatever you do to the VMware partition(folder) stays within that partition (folder). For an example, I am running Windows XP Pro on the largest portion of my hard drive. I installed VMware Workstation and set out to create a Virtual Desktop (Operating System) with Ubuntu 8.04. I went through the wizard to set up my Virtual Desktop (O/S), allocating the space necessary for the Virtual Hard Drive (The amount of room you desire to use for the Virtual Desktop), and then the rest of the parameters that I wish to use. Once I was finished with all of that, I inserted the Ubuntu 8.04 disc that I created (you could also just use an .iso file without going through the bother of using a disc) and just followed the prompts necessary for installing ubuntu on my Virtual Hard Drive. It will come to a point where it will ask you (as you stated earlier) if you want to format the hard drive, and anything you have on it will be lost, etc. At this point, there is nothing on the virtual hard drive- It is a clean slate and installing the Ubuntu on it will NOT affect the Host System (Which is Windows XP Pro) so I just went on ahead and installed it. once finished, I now have an Ubuntu 8.04 virtual computer running at the same time as Windows XP Pro is running. All they do is share some resources (RAM,Processor,sound, etc) and you can even move back and forth between them without much hassle at all. I love my VMware, and another cool thing is you can create a Virtual Desktop to be used as a back up in case you screw something up. All you need to do is open up the backup copy and it's as if you never screwed up.
I hope that this long-winded response has helped in some way.

Add another ease of mind things on to the list.

AS LONG AS YOU ARE INSTALLING IN VMWARE:
You are pretty dang safe. VMWare does not allow direct access to any other part of your computer(With limited exceptions) Even its access to your Host OS Hard Drive/Partition, should you choose to enable it, is via network protocols so direct access is limited even there.

This is also part of why there is a performance hit in virtualization. However in my own personal experience, turn off any unneeded background processes, run with plenty of RAM, and run off an external (or 2nd) drive, and it is pretty decent performance.

Seablade

trust your spidey sense

I love VMware. It is a developer/tester's friend.

We use VMWare at work - but the other way around. 10 VMs running our XP build atop VMWare ESX (their Enterprise platform based IIRC on RHEL)

THis is on each VM host server...
Each VM runs out of its own directory - abotu 6 files.. one of those is a virtual filesystem.