Virtualizing existing Linux partition on the local machine using VMWare Workstation 9.0

Question

I am trying out VM Workstation 9.0 on Windows and I am tried to run the existing linux partition by following steps blow:

Create a new VM > Advanced > Choose to install the OS later > select Debian 6 64bit > .... > Use Physical Disk > Use individual partion > Select the partition (not the swap) > Finish

The message I get here is
Grub loading...
_

and nothing else. So it is not seeing the OS properly. I am dual booting on my machine Windows 7 Pro and Crunchbang Waldorf 64-bit. The default MBR is Grub and I have set the timeout on Grub for me to select which partition to boot. I also tried to change the boot order and also tried to boot from a LiveCD, but had no success. My hard drive is SSD and its IDE interface was shown as ATAPI and I chose LSI logic. From my understanding what I am trying to do is achievable, so what am I doing wrong here?

This is a possible duplicate to this, but it is 2.5 year old post and I am having a trouble getting it to work.

Answer 1

The answer is to create a boot disk, or grub.iso from the operating system that is to be virtualized. The script I used, specifically for Crunchbang Waldorf is:

#!/bin/sh
set -e

wk_dir=$(mktemp -d "${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/tmp.XXXXXXXXXX")
mkdir -p ${wk_dir}/boot/grub

# copy your /boot/grub/grub.cfg file to the work dir
cp -v /boot/grub/grub.cfg ${wk_dir}/boot/grub

# run grub-mkrescue should create new image grub.iso in the current dir
grub-mkrescue --modules="ext2 lvm" -o ./grub.iso ${wk_dir}

rm -rf ${wk_dir}

Source of the script

I assume that the script will work for most Debian / Ubuntu disto. The virtualization is also possible on Virtualbox