Adding second physical hard disk to Boot Camp-based VM

[lyew]

I've been looking around in the forum for a solution to this problem but don't think I've found one. Basically, when I installed fusion, I had 2 HDs. One for the Mac OS, and the other has windows vista (installed via Boot Camp). After installation, I added a third HD (with two NTFS partitions). But when I run the Windows VM, the two partitions just aren't recognized and don't show up on "My Computer." I tried adding a hard disk in the Virtual Machine settings, but the only option I have in the filename is "Boot Camp partition-IDE_1-1.vmdk" and a slightly different file for the SCSI version. How do I get Fusion to recognize the other two NTFS partitions as HDDs that I can add to my Windows VM?

[rcardona2k · Accepted solution]

The boot camp virtual machine preparation process maps one host logical partition to the VM using vmware-rawdiskCreator. Even if you had one physical disk with two NTFS partitions you would end up with a VM mapping to one partition. For all other partitions on the same or another physical disk, you're somewhat on your own to map those. In Terminal, run the vmware-rawdiskCreator utility and take a look at the usage, e.g.

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

Usage:

/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator print is the virtual disk type. It must be one of "ide",

"buslogic", or "lsilogic".

Use the "print" option for your third physical disk, which should be on /dev/disk2 (note: the device order is not guaranteed by OS X). Once you create raw disk VMDK partition files, you have to edit your VM's configuration in a text editor and add the partitions as ide or scsi mount points, e.g.

ide0:1.present = "TRUE"

ide0:1.fileName = "PhysicalDisk2Partition1.vmdk"

ide1:1.present = "TRUE"

ide1:1.fileName = "PhysicalDisk2Partition2.vmdk"

After this step, when you boot your VM, Fusion will unmount your "Boot Camp" partitions and make them available to your virtual machine in which case they should show up under My Computer.

[lyew]

Wow, thanks for this. I will try it out when I have access to my computer on Monday.

[lyew]

Thank you very much for your help with this. I ran into a couple of problems creating the .vmdk files. The system kept telling me that it was unable to copy the files from the source to destination folder. I think this issue was raised in another forum thread. So I "cd-ed" to my directory containing the Boot Camp partition.vmx file, and created the .vmdk file there. This time it worked. But the VM still refused to recognize the new hard disk partition until I finally added this line:

ide0:1.deviceType = "disk"

Everything worked from that point and the new hard disk partition is accessible from within my Windows VM.

By the way, does anyone know where I can go to find out how many ide devices each VM can have? Am I right in assuming that ide0:0 basically is recognized as primary master, 0:1 is primary slave, 1:0 is secondary master, and so on?

[rcardona2k]

Sorry - I did leave off the device type setting. As to the IDE question: you can have four devices as in a physical PC with two IDE channels. IDE0:0 is usually the primary IDE master with a bootable HD. IDE1:0 is usually the primary CD/DVD drive. that leaves free IDE0:1 (slave on primary channel) and IDE1:1 (slave on secondary channel). BTW, you can move your CD/DVD drive to a SCSI mount point leaving all four IDE slots available. To do this you'll need to define a SCSI adapter, e.g.

scsi0.present="TRUE"

scsi0.0.present = "TRUE"

then change your remaining ide1:0 settings for your CD/DVD drive to scsi0:0.