I had some problems booting up to my LAB iso using VMWARE Server. The solution turned out to be editing the vmx file (vmware configuration file) to make it use an Intel nic. apparently PE does not recognize the vmware default nic.
Perhaps later I will figure out how to add vmware drivers to PE, but for now this worked.
Update - Eventually I had to add two NICS to my Virtual Machine. One of them an Intel as it says below, the other one Default AMD type.
- Open the .vmx file for your virtual machine
- Delete all references to network devices i.e ethernet
- Paste the following into your vmx file and save
ethernet0.present= "true"
ethernet0.startConnected = "true"
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
ethernet0.connectionType = "bridged"
This information came from
Sanbarrow.comIf you need the Mass Storage drivers (Error 3 cannot access hard drive) then you can try and download them from
The VMWARE Website if the link is dead search the site for VMSCSI.
It did not work for me. I created a custom VM and specified it to use a IDE drive and not a SCSI Drive.