You would have to manually add a second raw disk to the Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine as there is no way to do it through the Fusion UI.

Search using: add raw disk boot camp

Okay here is what I did...

In the Search Community text box (in the upper right hand corner of every page in this Forum) I typed "add raw disk boot camp" (without the quotes) and pressed Enter.

Next I read several posts.

Note: I have a MacBook Pro and it only has one hard disk so I attached a Firewire Drive that has 2 partitions, 1 NTFS and 1 HFS+ in order to process the commands and add a second disk to my Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine. I used System Profiler (/Applications/Utilities/System Profiler) to get the BSD Name of the Firewire Drive as it's needed in the <diskDev> argument of the vmware-rawdiskCreator command.

From what I read I needed to use the vmware-rawdiskCreator command so in a Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) I typed the following command:

$ "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator" print /dev/disk2

The output of which was:



Note: I do not store my Normal Fusion Virtual Machine's in the Default Location and the Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine is in a different location then the normal Virtual Machine however I would store the .vmdk files for the 2nd disk in the same location as my normal Virtual Machine and keep a backed up copy prior to use so in the event of having to rebuild the metadata for the Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine. So the <virtDiskPath> argument of the vmware-rawdiskCreator command reflects that.

Next I typed the following command:

$ "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator" create /dev/disk2 1 "/Virtual Machines/BCVM_DISK2/disk2" ide

This created 2 files:

/Virtual Machines/BCVM_DISK2/disk2.vmdk
/Virtual Machines/BCVM_DISK2/disk2-pt.vmdk

I then edited the Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine's Boot Camp partition.vmx configuration file to include the following:

ide0:1.present = "TRUE"
ide0:1.fileName = "/Virtual Machines/BCVM_DISK2/disk2.vmdk"

Note: On my system the Boot Camp partition.vmx file is located at "/Users/WKZ/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm/Boot Camp partition.vmx" and I backed it up before editing it.

I then started my Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine and tested Reading/Writing to the newly added 2nd hard disk and all was okay!

Note: To understand about the Virtual Machine Bundle Package and editing the .vmx configuration file have a look at: A Beginner's Guide to VMware Fusion

Note: For the syntax of the vmware-rawdiskCreator command just execute the command without any arguments.

$ "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator"

The syntax for the create argument of the vmware-rawdiskCreator command is:

"/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator" create <diskDev> <partNum> <virtDiskPath> <adapterType>

And you can see what those arguments are from the output of the vmware-rawdiskCreator command executed without any arguments.

HTH

See A Beginner's Guide to VMware Fusion for where to find the .vmx config file


Any text editor should be work.

Worked for me too - this is brilliant!

IT WORKS ! Excellent ! thank for this tutorial !

But..... during the drive is virtualized in Fusion session, it is not enable with os/x. Any miraculous idea for that ??

I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to carefully document your vmware-rawdiskCreator procedure!

It seems to me that we can use your method to migrate a virtual disk to a physical disk.

Cheers, Steve

I could easily be missing something, but my thought was that once one has R/W access to a physical disk, it just requires an OS copy of the entire virtual disk to the physical disk? An XP copy may not handle all permissions correctly, and certainly wouldn't work for open system files -- but would it not work for unopened application and data files? At least for those that have no hated Registry entanglements?