Successfully installed Gentoo on real hardware and then thought of trying same installation on VMware server 1.0.1.
Religiously followed the Gentoo Handbook page for both the installation.
All went well for real hardware installation but on VMware it failed to boot from hard disk after installation with an error message saying that /dev/sda3 is not a valid block device.
Gentoo HOWTO wiki page helped me to identify the problem and gave solution as well.
VMware seems to be using different driver for scsi devices and so /dev/sda3 is not able to mount as root partition hence stopping kernel from booting successfully.
I recompiled the kernel with some more addition to the kernel configuration
$ genkernel --menuconfig --no-mrproper --no-clean all
above command will allow you to keep all your existing configuration and add some more configuration parameters.
Earlier my kernel on VMware gentoo had Modular support for scsi_generic and Kernel support for scsi_disk. Modified the kernel configuration and added these two modules as a built in Kernel support. Made sure that the menuconfig windows has <*> before SCSI disk support and SCSI generic support.
These options can be found here at menuconfig windows...
Device Drivers -->
SCSI device support -->
<*> SCSI disk support
....
....
<*> SCSI generic support
This re-compiled kernel did the magic for me. Gentoo on VMware boots great from hard disk.
Network also had an issue as VMware needs AMD PCnet32 PCI support. Solution is to either build kernel with AMD PCnet32 PCI support OR load the kernel module pcnet32 by default at boot time.
cheer, make world open...
