[EricTheRed]

My Mac Pro's boot drive developed a growing case of bad blocks and so I replaced it with a new internal HDD. Unfortunately the drive was too far gone for me to make a copy of it. It was also too far gone for me to migrate from the old HDD to the new drive.

Nevertheless, the old drive still has good data on it and so I grabbed files and applications by hand and dragged them to where they are supposed to go on the new HDD that is running OSX 10.5.2, like the old drive.

I tried to fire up VM Ware Fusion that I'd copied over but it didn't work so I tried installing a fresh copy. That takes but the virtual machine cannot see the Windows XP disk in order for me to install a new operating system. So i told the install application to uninstall and then manually removed the Virtual Machine folder in Documents as well as the VM Ware preferences from the preferences folder within Library. However, when I install VM Ware again from the install disk, it still remembers its serial number and cannot see the windows install disk.

What preference do I need to find and chuck so I can really, really do a complete fresh install that will see the Windows XP install disk?

Thanks!

[EricTheRed]

Got it figured out.

Because I have two internal CD/DVDs in my Mac Pro apparently VMware's Fusion couldn't figure out which drive to look for the Windows install disk and instead looked out on the network for an installation disk to no avail.

The solution:

1) When setting up a new virtual machine uncheck and do not select the default "Start virtual machine and install operating system now." Instead leave the default radio button "Use operating system installation disk" (which will not help you but can't be unchecked so whatever). The end result is that a new virual machine will be created but it will immediately bring up the settings.

2) Select the CD/DVD setting and uncheck the auto detect and manually select which cdrom to use. In my Mac Pro the upper tray was cdrom1 and the lower tray was cdrom0. Once the CD/DVD is selected, installation with your Windows disk should proceed normally.

[ghporter]

Great stuff, Eric. A "lesson learned" that we can use. Thanks for posting.