Multiple Boot Camp Partitions

[haralds]

It would be desirable to mount a second Boot Camp partition in the configuration of the first.

[admin]

Can you be more specific? When would you have two boot camp configurations, and what do you mean "in the configuration of the first"?

[fromageus]

I think haralds is asking for what I want; I have a minimal boot camp partition on the internal drive in my MBP since you can't boot BootCamp off an external drive. For data, I have an external USB drive with a large FAT partition.

What I want to do (and I got going with Parallels, with a little hackery) is mount the FAT drive as my 😧 drive when running under fusion, essentially add a second 'boot camp' partition as ide0:1 or whatever.

Grubbing around in the vmware files, it looks like I can make that fly if I generate the right vmdk file, but that looks to be hard work.

Is there a way to make vmware do this, or even just generate the right vmdk for me?

[admin]

There's currently no way to get Fusion to do this, you have to create the vmdk with vmware-rawdiskCreator then add it to the vmx yourself. Depending on how comfortable with the command line you are, you might consider it trivial or extremely confusing.

[haralds]

I am comfortable with command line - all the way back to Unix in the 80s - still use vi

But a step by step HowTo would make it easier. Is there a man page or FAQ on vmware-rawdiskCreator and the VMX file format?

-- Harald

[admin]

vmware-rawdiskCreator with no arguments will give terse usage info, it's in /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/. The vmx file format is plain text, publicly undocumented, but easy enough to figure out for things like this - use the entry for the existing disk as a template and bump the index (e.g. ide0:0 -> ide1:0 or ide0:1). Also search the forums, you're not the first person to do this.

[fromageus]

Honestly, after I posted I spent some time messing around. Through a combination of fdisk, gpt, dd and vi I actually had a vmdx I was going to attempt to boot with (I was waiting for my VM to finish installing updates, what's up with the speed of disk access?!), before I saw haralds's post. That tool was exactly what I needed.

I think it's a little lame that I had to edit the vmx file directly to add the image. While I'm totally comfortable with that, it seems like the GUI ought to support using an existing image file, instead of forcing you to create one.

[admin]

You can use an existing disk when creating a new VM, just not when adding an additional disk. I'm not aware of any particular reason for this other than that whoever wrote it didn't do it, I'll be sure it's noted as a feature request.

Edit: Yep, it's already in the tracking system.