Support for EFI Bootcamp on external disk

[tbck]

Hello,

I recently installed Bootcamp on my external Thunderbolt SSD because both software and hardware (Windows 8.1 and the new Haswell rMBP) support booting from the external disk via EFI.

Unfortunately I can’t get VMware Fusion 6.0.2 to run this external Bootcamp in a Virtual Machine.

I create a new Machine, choose "More Options" -> "Install from Bootcamp" and sure enough, Fusion does detect the external drive as a valid Bootcamp installation. It then successfully creates a Boot Camp virtual machine, but when I try to boot that Virtual Machine it, it doesn’t detect a valid drive to boot from.

If needed I can provide the complete debug log. It would be nice to have VMware Fusion support external EFI Bootcamp installations soon.

[wila]

Hi,

Maybe it just can't locate the boot drive?

Have you tried to set the startup disk under settings?

You might also want to try and change the drive type under the Hard Disk to IDE (see also here: Re: Can't Upgrade to Windows 8.1 on Fusion 5 ) if it's not already set to IDE.

--

Wil

[tbck]

Hi,

Thanks for the helpful suggestions.

The Hard Disk is set to IDE, but I wouldn’t be able to change it because the options are greyed out ( /!\ Hard disk settings cannot be changed for Boot Camp disks.)

The Startup disk is set correctly under settings.

I’m trying to access the Boot Camp drive directly from the Virtual Machine without cloning it. I suspect cloning might work, but that would defeat the point.

It does seem like Fusion can’t locate the Boot Drive during startup, but I don’t know how to point it in the right direction. Technically there is no virtual machine disk image because it should interface directly with the external SSD.

I should mention that  VMware does unmount the Windows partition from OS X when I try to start the VM — as it should, I believe — yet all I see is "Attempting to start up from: EFI Vmware Virtual IDE Hard Drive (IDE 0:0)... unsuccessful."

[WoodyZ]

Technically there is no virtual machine disk image because it should interface directly with the external SSD.

I guess it depends on one's definition of both "technically" and "virtual machine disk image" as a Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine has both a "Disk DescriptorFile" .vmdk and a binary .vmdk (or meta-data virtual hard disk) that enables the use of the physical disk/partition and as such having this layer access to the physical disk is not completely direct.

It would be interesting to see if manually using vmware-rawdiskCreator to create a meta-data .vmdk to the external disk would then be able to run as a Virtual Machine.

[Gutseo]

Hey I'm having the same issues and tried to use this guide and it got me farther than i have before so maybe you will have better luck with it.. I'm still poking and prodding the settings...

TechReminders: Add physical disk to VMware Fusion guest OS

for example instead of doing ide as the drive type i chose SATA

at this point i have vmware recognizing that it is a bootcamp drive which is great but i have yet to be able to boot to it :\...

Good luck