Further Adventures with VMWare Workstation Player

[bobalex]

or Forward ... Into the Past

The most important components of my computer (motherboard & CPU) celebrated their 10th birthday (quietly) on November 5, 2008. Last July one of the SATA connectors stopped working. Cable problem? No. I moved the cable to a free connector and all was well. But it was An Omen. When something on the mobo stops working there's a chance other things on the board may start to fail as well. Tick ... tick ... tick. It was time to look for a replacement mobo/CPU combo. Last week I purchased a refurbished Asus P6T Intel X58 with an i7 920 for $110 CAD (about $80 US).

I dual boot Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon and Windows 7. On the Mint side I used VMWare Workstation Player 15 to minimize having to boot over to The Dark Side. But I found out VMWare 15 would not install. All the virtualization options were enabled in the BIOS so it was balking at the CPU. I thought if 15 won’t work possibly an earlier version might. Nope. I hunted down version 12.5 and ... no dice. I had to install VMWare’s stupider cousin ... VirtualBox. It’s not pretty, but it works. Just. Eventually I was done installing all the software on both sides of the dual boot. But ...

I had an idea. One last try for VMWare Workstation Player 15. What If I updated the BIOS? Maybe if I made the mobo as “current” as it could be ... then VMWare wouldn’t hate the hardware so much. Though flashing the BIOS isn’t as nerve-wracking as it used to be ... and I’ve never bricked a mobo before ... I still have anxiety about it. If for some reason Something Goes Wrong ... I don’t like gambling with the possibility that maybe I’ll have to spend more money to get another mobo/CPU combo, and then spend more time building everything up from scratch again. Well ... God hates a coward ... so here we go.

After flashing the BIOS I tried installing version 15 again. No way. But maybe ... just maybe ... version 12.5 won’t be so !@#$%&* picky and will like the updated mobo. And It Did. I installed Windows (again) and it went smoothly. I kept expecting VMWare to screech to a halt during the process with the software equivalent of, “Hey buddy ... are you trying to pull a fast one?”

After installing Photoshop and Audition CS6 in the vm I’m really truly absolutely positively never going to !@#$%&* with it again so help me Gawd. I took an image of the drive and can now proceed with my life uninterrupted.

I don’t know how many people will find themselves in a similar situation with similar hardware ... but in this particular case ... there is a successful way out.