I am trying to install the Catalyst 12.8 package for Windows 8 x64. I am working with both the RP and Enterprise x64 versions on a Win 7 x64 host through VMware 9 ( I have also tried the latest version of VirtualBox). My issue is that the installer manager works fine but never gives an option to install ths CCC or drivers or anything else except the SDK runtime files and the install manager. I can see the drivers in the directory after the install completes but the CCC does not install. My question is this. Am I having trouble with the install because of the VM environment or is there something else I am missing? If I had Windows 8 installed on my system without a VM would it install without issue? Hopefully that makes sense. I have successfully installed all necessary tools for VMware (or VirtualBox) to install drivers. I even installed the .net 1.1 framework (as AMD suggested). Am I really just :bang: for no reason and I should relax and go with the default drivers, or is there an advantage to installing specific drivers for evaluation purposes? If this has been answered already, than I apologize. Perhaps I didn't use the right keywords, but I haven't found an answer yet. On a side note, it seems the same thing is happening with Realtek sound drivers. I am beginning to suspect that both of these are related running under a VM.
Yea you need to install VMWare Tools for the drivers for the virtual machine, not the drivers for the hardware in the host
As I mentioned in my post, I had already installed the necessary tools before I attempted the catalyst install.
And as mentioned the Virtual Machine does not "pass through" your hardware. Instead the Virtual Machine provides Virtual Hardware to your guest. You install drivers for that hardware and they are provided along with the Virtual Machine. Go to the VM's web-site and look for the instructions as they would pertain to you.
My apologies if I was not clear. I have correctly installed the VMware tools inside of the virtual environment. I have tried to install the catalyst package, again, inside the virtual environment. Virtually everything I have tried has been inside the virtual world using virtual tools, installing virtual drivers for virtual devices and hardware, all the while logged into the Virtual machine.:eyes:
You cannot install traditional drivers in a VM. To specifiy what this means, lets say you have a desktop with a Radeon HD 5770. Lets say your main OS is Windows 7. Now lets say your install Windows 7 in a Virtual machine on that computer. You CANNOT install Catalyst packages in the Virtual Machine. You CAN install Catalyst packages on the main OS. The Virtual Machine does not have direct access to your main computer's hardware (it might be able to access the CPU directly on supported platforms, along with some USB devices, but stuff like audio, graphics, SATA/RAID controllers, are inaccessible). VMWare Player uses it's own version of a graphics adapter in Window's guest OS's (guest being virtual), and uses Intel-based IDE and SCSI controllers. It also uses a Creative audio card I think. This is the default setup. You "may" be able to customize what hardware is in your virtual machine, but it's probably not an easy task, if possible. You "may" also be able to use vendor-specific drivers in place of VMWare's drivers, but this isn't recommended, and probably most definitely not supported. Windows Update on the guest OS asked to update the Creative audio driver, which I allowed, and works fine though. I imagine other virtualization software is the same.
You do not install the Catalyst drivers inside your guest operating system. Your virtual environment contains a virtual graphics card which the virtual drivers configure for the guest operating system to use. See: VirtualBox Guest Additions See: VMWare Tools Read the funny manual. RTFM.
Thank you Espionage, that was the kind of answer I was looking for.:thumbup:; I appreciate it. I already understood completely the difference between VMware's virtual drivers and 'real-world' drivers, I was just curious if the real ones could be installed in the 'guest'/virtual OS.
You CAN pass-through physical hardware in ESX and xen to your virtual machines but your computer requires must have following: either VT-D or IOMMU. People, if you cannot speak with knowledge on this, than don't speak at all. Please read this whole thing before going through the list. there is some excerpts you should read so you know. By default, ESX will assign a virtual graphics card, that can be enhanced with vmtools installed in the VM. It is definitely not gaming worthy on that driver as its just allocating RAM for its use. Normally about 8 MB by default. Basically in a nutshell, this is basically what I had to do: 1.)Ensure your CPU is VT-D compatible. For example the i7-3770 is but the i7-3770k is not. AMD, ensure it is IOMMU. 2.)Also, check with your motherboard maker to ensure your board does support VT-D/IOMMU. Some boards do not. The Z77 chipset in my computer does support VT-D. I'm using the G1-Sniper 3 rev1.0 board. Once You setup the pre-ESX stuff, comes the next part: 3.)Under the main ESX configuration in Advanced Settings, you have to choose the devices you want to Passthrough. This requires a restart every time you make a change. Note some devices will just plainly not work. 4.)Setup the virtual machine in whichever flavor of operating systems there is out there. 4.a)After the virtual machine is installed, make sure to add the PCI or usb devices accordingly to the virtual machine. 5.)Inside the virtual machine, install the respective display driver of the graphics card. If you reboot your esx server and you get stuck on the CNIC has successfully loaded, this issue is because of graphics card allocation. You want to make certain you are dedicating your ESX console to a different graphics card not being pass through-ed to a VM. 6.)In Linux, make sure you update xorg to whichever. In windows, you might have to adjust the display to that card. Another note: when rebooting ESX, it will default back to the svga adapter. You can do some things to make this revert upon boot of the OS. I won't go into this. 7.)Installing drivers inside the virtual machines is another handbasket; I honestly couldn't tell you how I did it; I was drunk one night and the next morning it was working, I tend to have this happen often probably something along the line of updating the INF files to the hardware ids but I could be wrong. I will state that it is a very beta feature in both xen and vmware. I've been running my setup since basically when I got my 7970's without a problem(for a few months now), but it took several days of madness to get it all wrinkled out; but even then, there is limitations and some performance loss, not much though. Adobe flash is one particular culprit that doesn't work off of gpu hardware acceleration, this can be changed in it's configuration. Just a note, to get past the 2 GB memory allocation limit, you might want to look at pcihole.start and pcihole.end I right now have allocated 12 GB of RAM without a problem.
