[Thinkpad] COM Ports with VMWare

[Michael Geary]

> From: Lewis Bailey
> I recentely installed VMWare on a T30 running Windows XP.
> I have created a virtual machine with Windows 98 SE within
> VMWare.  The COM ports within Windows 98 do not appear
> to be working correctly, they show up in the device manager
> and have been added through VMWare, yet the software I
> am using that requires the COM port does not appear to be
> receiving anything from the port.  The purpose for using the
> VMWare program to begin with is that the software requires
> VXD drivers that appearantly are not supported within
> Windows XP.

Lewis, you mention COM "ports". I believe your T30 has a single serial port.
Are you talking about one serial port or more than one?

In your VM's configuration, which physical serial port is the Serial 1
device mapped to? Does the configuration say "Connect at power on" if the VM
is not running, and "Connected" if the VM is running?

Is the physical port listed (e.g. "Using port COM1") the same COM port
number that is assigned to the serial port on the host system? Can you use
that serial port from the host system?

You may want to ask about this in the VMware Community Forum:

http://www.vmware.com/community
(seems to be down at the moment, try again later if it is)

or in the VMware newsgroups--the server is news.vmware.com.

(I'm not suggesting that the question is unwelcome here, only that there are
more VMware experts in those forums.)

-Mike