Suspend a BootCamp VM

[Offbeatmammal]

with a regular Win10 VM I can suspend it and it preserves state - so it's quick to restart and be back where I want to do.

However, for the BootCamp VM there is no suspend option - all you can do is shuts the VM down, which means hopping in and out becomes more of a chore.

I've ended up creating a new Win10 VM that sits side-by-side with my BootCamp one because probably 80% of the time I'm living in OSX and it's only really to play games I go to BootCamp, but ... because the two are different partitions it's a pain to access files, email and other apps because they're always installed in the other VM!

Is there any way that a Win10 BootCamp partition when being run as a VM can be suspended in the same way as a regular VM? I'm willing to risk some "here be dragons" issues or extra steps to boot between OSX and Win10 but the convenience factor would be huge!

[wila]

Hi,

No, that is not supported for boot camp.

From the help (emphasis mine):

Suspend and Resume a Virtual Machine in Fusion Pro

The suspend and resume feature is useful to save the current state of a virtual machine and continue work later from the same state, even if you quit Fusion Pro in the interim.

Fusion does not support suspending and resuming in Boot Camp virtual machines. Suspending and resuming rely on being able to save a known state that will not change. You can boot natively into Windows in the Boot Camp partition. When you do so, the known state is lost and data loss occurs.

Procedure

♦

Take one of the following actions.

■

Select Virtual Machine > Suspend to suspend your virtual machine.

You can also set a Fusion Pro preference to suspend the virtual machine when you close the virtual machine window.

■

Select Virtual Machine > Resume to resume your virtual machine.

--

Wil

[Offbeatmammal]

as I said, I'm happy to have to jump through hoops (eg stopping the VM instance before booting into BootCamp). just saying "no" seems overly limiting

[ColoradoMarmot]

Remember that the VM *is* the boot camp install.  You can't boot windows clean while it's suspended, then go back and recover the suspended state - either in a virtual machine or directly on the hardware.

There is no technical way to do so without losing data -  you'd have to throw away the suspended state, which is like hard-powering off the machine.

Shutting down the VM, then run boot camp is the only option that prevents data loss.

[Mikero]

In my early days at VMware we used to hack the .vmx to allow it to suspend.

BAD THINGS ENSUE. VERY VERY VERY BAD THINGS.

Basically every time it has completely hosed the Windows installation.