Hi Ross, and welcome to the VMware Communities!

We're observing this issue more and more as the OptiBay (and OWC Data Doubler and other equivalents) become popular choices for MacBook Pro users.  We have several Communities threads on the topic by now, but I haven't found the root cause yet.  It seems remarkably unpredictable... we've had users report that the problem is triggered (or is cured!) by switching between wireless and wired networking or between battery and AC power, or by putting the MacBook to sleep and waking it, etc.  There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it, and what fixes the problem in one case will trigger it in another.

If you'd like to help us figure out the problem, could you please:

• provide your system's Model Identifier from System Profiler (i.e. MacBookPro5,1)
• provide the brand and model for your storage devices?  Did you move the original HDD to the optical bay, did it remain in its original location, or was it removed from the system?
• Try disabling the Sudden Motion Sensor, as described here. EDIT: This does not help.

You're not in any way obliged to do any the above, of course, but we'd really appreciate if you could help us try to solve this once and for all.

Cheers,

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Darius

Hello Ross,

I ordered myself a MCE Optibay as well and will put it in my MBP when I get home, 3 weeks from now (around New Year)

But hopefully we can diagnose this before then and get you going.

Can you attach the vmware.log file from a problem VM and attach it to your reply here when it does NOT startup properly or when you are seeing those performance issues?

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Wil

Hello Ross,

I had a look at the logs and I do see a few things that make me want you to try the following.

Can you shut down your virtual machine (not suspend, really choose shut down from the start "Orb" in Windows)

Then shut down Fusion as well. It is critical that both are shut down as I want you to add a single line to the virtual machine configuration.

If they are not properly shut down then the change to the configuration file will not stick and be overwritten by the original file.

Locate the "Windows 7 x64.vmx" in your /HD1/Virtual Machines/Windows 7 x64.vmwarevm folder.

Make a copy of the original (just to make sure, should not be needed, but an extra vmx file won't hurt)

Open that file with TextEdit (right click (or control+click), select "Open With" and scroll down to TextEdit)

Now near the bottom add the following line:

isolation.tools.hgfs.notify.enable = "FALSE"

Save the file and close TextEdit.

Then restart your virtual machine and see if you can make the slowness return (as you said, sometimes it works OK, sometimes not, so it might take a little while to figure out if this worked)

hope this helps,

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Wil

This may be some useful information to help narrow down this issue. I currently have two laptops -- a 15" MacBook Pro (2011) with an OptiBay and have had NO problems whatsoever. However, after installing an OptiBay in a 13" MacBook Pro with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor I get the behavior listed consistenlty. 100% processor utilization by vmware. If the machine finally boots (sometimes after 30 to 45 minutes) it runs fine. It is definitely an issue that is causing serious problems at the moment.

The machine that has the problem is a MacBook Pro5,5. I moved the traditional drive (which was not the original drive in the MacBook) to the OptiBay. I installed the SSD as the primary drive. The drive in the OptiBay is a ST95005620AS (I believe a Western Digital 7200rpm). The main drive is now an Intel SSDSA2CW120G3 with the latest firmware installed.

Not to muddy the waters, but I did also have both drives on this laptop encrypted with Lion. On the laptop that is working properly (a MacBookPro8,2) only the SSD is encrypted. I have since decrypted the drive in the laptop with the issue. Currently the vm's are booting fine, but it is intermittent so we will see if this holds. I will update once I see if it is consistent.

The encryption made no difference. The vm booted fine a once and now has hung on boot once again.

Message was edited by: jdr2000