Windows XP guest from raw partition under VMWare 4, coLinux as rescue

So far I never was able to run a Windows XP guest OS from a raw disk partition using Linux VMWare. Here's the discussion thread. I guess coLinux will rescue me sooner or later. OK. Now I got it working: The user who runs vmware must be a member of the "disk" group to have access to the partition where XP is installed. Then I downloaded the GAG boot loader disk image from http://gag.sourceforge.net. The unzipped folder contains the file disk.dsk. This is a disk image file and I selected it under VM Settings > Floppy Drive > Use a floppy image and it should be connected at bootup. The removable device (=floppy) should be in the virtual BIOS of VMware higher in the boot order than any other existing boot device. If not you need to go with F2 into the BIOS and change it. As preparation of the physical hard disk I just duplicated the only existing current hardware profile and renamed it to "virtual". Then I created a new custom virtual machine and selected raw partition as disk and specifically ONLY the partition where XP is installed (in my case hda1; not the whole disk hda). Then I booted into GAG and selected 4 in order to install GAG. Then I created an entry for the virtual XP and saved the configuration to floppy. When starting, XP managed to get to the hardware profile selector but died with a blue screen of death and the error message "STOP Message: 0x0000007B". This seems to be an "inaccessible boot device" error and the reason is the hardware-specific IDE controller of my laptop. I had to reboot into Windows XP (selecting the virtual hardware profile) and update the IDE controller manually selecting the "Standard Dual Channel IDE controller". After this VMware managed to boot from the raw partition and after all kinds of errors and driver installs and several reboots it started working.