Very slow installation of RHEL5 on Workstation

For some reason it's taking over 30 minutes to install RHEL5 in VMware Workstation 7.1 (in comparison it only took 10 minutes to install RHEL5 in VirtualBox on my laptop with much lower specs). Any ideas? (storing the VM on my 1.5 TB drive that I have dedicated for VMs)

UPDATE: It's taking over an hour now.
I don't have a slow machine at all for my desktop:
Phenom II 955 quad
8 GB of RAM
1 TB WD EADS (system drive)
1.5 TB WD EARS (for VMs)

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exampasser

I tried out setting up an RHEL VM on the system drive and it installed within 8 minutes.

I don't know if it's the EARS drive 4k sector size causing issues, when I formatted it I just let Windows choose and under System Information it shows up as 512 bytes/sector (my preformatted external WD EARS drive also shows up as 512 bytes/sector but have not had any issues with it.)

UPDATE:Well I ran the WD align too and it said everything is ok, so I don't know what the issue is.
2nd UPDATE: I have tried installing RHEL5 on my external HDD (which is also an EARS drive) and I get the same crawling speed. I've installed an XP VM and it installed relatively quickly, within 15 minutes so I guess it's just a case of RHEL5 hating to be installed on a EARS drive. I'll just have to perform the VM installation on my system drive and just copy it over.

MentholMoose

What is the host OS? For the VMs, you can try creating an aligned partition on the virtual disk before installing the OS. Otherwise the VM installation (RHEL5 or XP) will create misaligned partitions, possibly causing slowness.

exampasser

For the host OS I'm running Windows 7 64-bit.

exampasser

MentholMoose wrote: »

What is the host OS? For the VMs, you can try creating an aligned partition on the virtual disk before installing the OS. Otherwise the VM installation (RHEL5 or XP) will create misaligned partitions, possibly causing slowness.

How would I go about creating an aligned partition? I thought that the type of physical disk used would not be an issue, but I might be just better off to return the EARS drive and get a normal sector size EADS drive (which are becoming hard to find.)

MentholMoose

You create an aligned partition on a virtual disk the same way you do it on a physical disk, you just do it inside the VM. For Windows VMs, I boot a Server 2008 ISO, choose Repair, and use the command prompt to create and format partitions with diskpart. For Linux VMs, I use a Linux live CD to get to a command prompt to use fdisk and mkfs.

exampasser

I meant how do you correctly make an aligned partition, I've read on a few websites that for the EARS drive the first partition should start on cylinder 64 and that all the rest after that should be multiples of 4, I've tried that but it didn't seem to work.

MentholMoose

That should work. Did you do it for both the physical and virtual disks? If you only do one, the net result is that read/writes are unaligned.

exampasser

When I checked the alignment of the physical disks on the host machine with WD align it said that they were properly aligned.

MentholMoose

Then the physical disk should be fine. If you format a disk in Windows Vista or above, it will be aligned properly by default, unlike Windows 2003 and below. Did you do the same for the virtual disk(s)?

exampasser

In the virtual machine made the linux partitions as I said above, starting on the 64th cylinder for the first partition and the rest of the partitions starting on a cylinder that is a multiple of 4.

MentholMoose

exampasser wrote: »

In the virtual machine made the linux partitions as I said above, starting on the 64th cylinder for the first partition and the rest of the partitions starting on a cylinder that is a multiple of 4.

And it's still slow? I'm out of ideas for now, sorry.

exampasser

MentholMoose wrote: »

And it's still slow? I'm out of ideas for now, sorry.

Thanks for all of your time and effort providing help, I guess I need to try to find a normal sector size EADS drive, which I'm having a hard time finding.