The past week or so the VMWare Fusion Windows XP install that I run for my work has been acting up. Really slow, absolute eon to shut down etc. Last night I got a little frustrated at it and instead of just waiting and shouting obscenities at it I just reset it. Shit, all those warnings were true. I managed to corrupt the NTFS partition table and caused the machine to endlessly loop in a 0×00000028 blue screen.
After googling for a while I decided that the best thing to do was get to a DOS prompt and run CHKDSK /P and hope that would repair it. Trickier than one would think since NTFS partitions are not visible from DOS. So I couldn’t just create a boot disk and boot to the prompt. Really the only way to do it easily is to insert the Windows XP install cd and select Recovery. That is unless you have a virtual pc like mine. You see VMWare Fusion creates SCSI hard drives by default unless you catch it in time, which I did not. And this SCSI drive won’t run using the default SCSI drivers that come in the usual Windows XP install. So no disk is found, ipso dipso no disk can be repaired.
In the interests of saving some other poor bastard a couple of minutes scratching their heads I found the VMWare SCSI driver here. Download it, unzip it, it’s a .flp virtual floppy disk image. Create a virtual floppy disk on your VM if you don’t already have one, mount the .flp image on the virtual floppy disk. Then when Windows XP setup asks you, press F6 to load that third party driver. Et Voila! The drive becomes available and you can get to it with the Recovery Console.
Great success. Now I am back to swearing at my slow XP VM every night. Just half a days productivity lost, thanks Bill, fuck you.
