OK, I have VMware Workstation 4 up and running and the first thing I did was create my Virtual OS. I already had Windows XP up on a seperate NTFS partition so I selected "Use Physical Disk" and selected "use entire drive." Well, right now I have 2 problems, when I select boot up, everything works fine, the GRUB bootloader comes up, I select Windows XP, Windows XP loads, but I get a BSOD while the Bootscreen comes up. I was able to get a screenshot of it and I'll type what it says if it's any help at the end of this. Well, just today I went into Windows XP (non VMware) so I can make a bootdisk to load into VMware and use NTFSDOS to run a chkdisk to see if that can help. Well, I had a power failure and my computer shut off. Thankfully I already made the disk. So I get into RH and open VMware, I select my WinXPpro and select boot. Now, all of a sudden, this error comes up:

Unable to open either the disk '/winXPPro/winXPPro.vmdk' or the redo log '/winXPPro.vmdk.redo_R7LLkl'
Failed to configure disk ide0:0. The virtual machine cannot be powered on with an unconfigured disk

Well, then I tried to make another Virtual machine the same way I made my WinXP one and I get the error:

Failed to load partitions for the device /dev/hda: The specified device is not a valid physical device. (BTW my Linux partition is on hda2 (bootloader), 3(ext3), 4(extended), and 5 (swap) so there isn't a problem with it)

Any Virtual Disk I make works though

I've tried recompiliing VMware in a newer kernel and an older one, both with the same result. Also, permissions are not the problem because both root, the regular use and a regular user using sudo both have the same result.

So, my questions are
1. How can I bypass that BSOD error, was I on the right track by attempting to do a chkdisk?

2. How can I fix that error

3. If I cannot fix it, can I mount my NTFS partition and make it a shared folder in VMware and copy the files to a Virtual Windows XP and get my files back? (Not the programs, they'll require reg entries which won't exist)

Plus one unrelated question, why are floppies run in Linux so damn loud when being read?

WinXp Stop message:

A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent further damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, restart your computer. If the screen appears again, follow these steps:

---cut out because of worthless info---
---end cut---

Technical information:

*** STOP: 0x0000007B (0xFAF72640, 0xC00000C4, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

Just a little extra stuff here, I opened my hardware browser tool and apparently, Hard Drives is empty. How can I add my hard drive back into my hardware configureation because I believe that that is my problem.

You were probably getting the initial error
as XP was getting confused because it was
booting on different (virtual) hardware to
what it was installed on, like installing on
one computer, taking out the hard drive and
putting it into another - sometimes it will
work and sometimes not.

Providing that the NTFS partition has not
become corrupt, you should be able to create
a virtual disk, install XP on it and then be
able to read the raw NTFS partition and copy
your data to either the virtual disk or onto
your linux file system.

Once you have your data, I would suggest
formatting the original XP partiton to FAT
rather than NTFS in order to be easily
accessible by linux. You can then go ahead
and reinstall windoze on it.