Migrate a fusion .vmdk to a boot camp partition?

[gibecker]

I've got a MBP with fusion 2.0, and I've got a windows XP VM that currently lives in a 36gig flat .vmdk file.

I'm interested in migrating this VM to a bootcamp partition, assuming that allowing the VM to use a disk partition will give me better performance than having to use a file through the MacOS filesystem layer. If that assumption is incorrect, I'm interested in knowing that.

I'm extremely familiar with VMware ESX & VMware server, but I'm a mac and fusion newbie, so please excuse any macigorance on my part.

The first step, re-partitioning the hard drive was simplicity itself; I simply ran boot camp assistant, adjusted the sizing, and told it to go. I can use diskutil from the command line, and see that there's a partition on the hard drive now.

My plan was to add the partition as a 2nd hard drive to my existing virtual machine, boot acronis trueimage from a CD image in the VM, have trueimage clone the .vmdk based drive to the partition based drive, then remove the .vmdk drive and let XP rip.

Unfortunately, I cant find any way to "select" a partition as a drive. The help was no help, and the Knowledge Base appears to be down. Can anyone help me out?

[WoodyZ]

You would need to add it as a RAW Disk to the Virtual Machine.

Have a look at my replies in:

For V2P you may want to have a look at: StorageCraft ShadowProtect Desktop Edition

[gibecker]

Okay, that looks close, but the rawdiskcreator didn't work for me.

Output from rawdiskcreator print /dev/disk0:

Nr Start Size Type Id Sytem

1 1 409639 BIOS EE Unknown

2 409640 410779648 BIOS AF HFS+

3 411453440 76943360 BIOS B Win95 FAT32

From that, it appears that the bootcamp partition I created is partition 3. That matches up with my ability to mount or unmount the partition; if I use diskutil to mount /dev/disk0s3, it shows up as "BOOTCAMP".

I went into my VM directory, and ran the following command:

/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk0 3 Bootcamp buslogic

and I got the following output:

Unable to create the source raw disk: The specified device is not a valid physical disk device (20).

Any ideas? I do currently have the partition unmounted, so there shouldnt be an issue of butting heads with OSX access to the partition.

[WoodyZ]

I went into my VM directory, and ran the following command:

/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk0 3 Bootcamp buslogic

Change buslogic to ide

[gibecker]

crap. That command allows me to create the .vmdk file, but I suspect that blows my plan to use Acronis Trueimage to simply image my install from the file-based virtual disk to the raw partition based disk, as XP is currently booting off what it believes to be a buslogic mode scsi disk, so changing the adapter type will leave XP unable to boot off the new drive. Am I incorrect?

Also, can you speak at all about the performance of a raw partition in IDE mode versus a file-based SCSI virtual disk?

Also, last question, do you know if I'll need to do anything special on OSX to prevent it from attempting to mount /dev/disk0s3 at boot, so it doesn't clash with VMware's access to the partition? I currently did "diskutil unmount /dev/disk0s3", but fstab appears to have gone away, and I have no idea if that unmount is persistent across boots or not.

And btw- thank you very much for your prompt help so far

[WoodyZ · Accepted solution]

fstab may not exist however do the following in a Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)

sudo /private/etc/fstab

Then add the appropriate information. On my BMP I have it as follows:

LABEL=BOOTCAMP none msdos rw,noauto 0 0

Now I do not see my Boot Camp partition when I boot my system although at the present time in Fusion 2.0 this doesn't stop Fusion from recognizing the partition and the entry will still show up in the Virtual Machine Library however Eric (etung) filled a bug report on it so I hope this will be addressed soon.

As far as SCSI Controller vs IDE when going from V2P that is why I have you a link to StorageCraft ShadowProtect Desktop Edition

As far as running XP natively on the Boot Camp partition vs a normal file base Virtual Machine vs running the Boot Camp partition as a Virtual Machine there are many variables that can impact the results and I just do not have time to get into all of it however it has been discussed to various extents before so a search of the forum should yield so info.

[gibecker]

Woody,

Thanks for your time. It appears from browsing the forums that due to OSX caching, emulated SCSI based file is faster than IDE-based raw partition, at least in a couple of anecdotal posts I was able to find. Booting XP natively on my MBP isn't something I was looking to do; I was purely guessing that raw partition would be faster than file-based disk image. Looks like my "evil plan" to improve my performance was a rathole. At least now I am pretty confident I could make it work, and I've learned a few bits in the meantime. Thanks!