Unable to mount external OS X formatted hard drive in Mac VM

[country_bebop]

Fusion for Mac 8.5.10

Mac Host Mavericks 10.9.5

Mac Guest Sierra 10.12.6

Mac is Late 2013 MacBookPro

I can mount a USB 3.0 and 2.0 thumb drive when I click on "Connect to the VM" when asked to choose where I want to connect (at least most of the time).

I have several LaCie Rugged drives that have Firewire 800 and USB ports.  I also have several LaCie Rugged drives that have a built in Thunderbolt cable and a USB-C port.  The LaCie drives come with adapter cables that end with a USB-A plug suitable for my MBP's USB port.  These drives with these USB cables work in a variety of Macs.

But after clicking on "Connect to the VM" they do not mount in the VM.  Command diskutil list doesn't show them either on the host or guest.

Is this a known problem for my Fusion, host or guest version? 

Does it work in some other version of Fusion, host or guest?

Is there some configuration setting that will make this work?

Are people able to get USB only (no firewire or thunderbolt) drives to mount?

Are people able to get other multi-port drives to mount?

Thank you

[Technogeezer]

Drives with USB ports work if that's the cabling that you use to connect them to your Mac. Even if they have multiple connectivity options ports, if you connect them via USB, they will be recognized as Fusion provides virtualization of USB.

Fusion does not provide virtualization of FireWire or Thunderbolt ports. If you use either of these port types to connect the drive to your Macs, Fusion will not see them.

FIreWire or Thunderbolt drives could be accessed by using Fusion's shared drives, or by sharing of the drives from your Mac via SMB and accessing the drive from the VM as a network share.

[country_bebop]

Thank you for your response. 

Perhaps I didn't make it clear that I am connecting the drives with the USB cabling provided by LaCie to my Mac.  However the drives don't mount after I choose the "Connect to the VM" button.

Any idea why it isn't working for me?

BTW, I had searched for help and found the Knowledge Base article 1021853 you quoted.  Thanks for posting that information to make the thread more complete.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Do the drives show up in Disk Utility in the guest at all?

[country_bebop]

When it doesn't mount, it doesn't show up in Disk Utility.

However, with more testing, I am finding that it the LaCie drives occasionally do mount if I wait long enough (at least 2-3 minutes).

In fact, as I was writing this comment, I re-tested the Sierra VM and mounted the Firewire/USB 3.0 LaCie drive with their USB cable.  Hooray!  The VM crashed however (first crash since I created the Sierra VM a year ago and I use it every day).

After the crash I tried to mount the Thunderbolt/USB-C drive and it wasn't in Disk Utility either.

I tried the Firewire/USB 3.0 LaCie and the Sierra VM crashed again while working on the comment.

My El Capitan VM is less flakey than Sierra.  El Capitan mounts about 50 - 70% of the time.

Lion and Mountain Lion don't mount the LaCie disks at all.  In fact after 8 minutes I get a message that I need to eject the drive because it can't be read.

So, I would like to amend my question:  Is there some way to get Mac Guest VMs to reliably mount an external USB connected drive?

Thanks

[dariusd]

Can you share more details of the crash?  Perhaps figuring that out will resolve an underlying problem preventing your drive from working correctly.

Did you encounter a guest panic (i.e. the virtual machine itself restarted and showed a message saying that it restarted because of a problem) or did the VM itself crash with an error saying "VMware Fusion has encountered an error and has shut down the virtual machine..."?

Can you upload (as attachments to a reply here) the vmware.log (and vmware-<#>.log files from inside the virtual machine bundle?

Thanks,

--

Darius

[country_bebop]

Here's what I remember what happened:  As I was copying some text from my comment, the VM's window went completely gray.  After a bit of time the window was gray with the words VMware in a large font size.  It stayed that way for 10 or 15 minutes and I went to Fusion's menu bar and selected the Virtual Machine menu.  I noticed that the "Mac OS is running" was the first item in the menu.  I selected Restart.  At some point I got a black screen in many languages telling me I had crashed and to type a character to continue.  After that I was presented a window that said a report would be sent to Apple.  I clicked on the Details button and copied it to MarkSierraVM Crash.txt which is included in my attachment with the logs.  I gave you all of the logs, even one from yesterday when I was trying to mount a disk but it didn't crash then.  The first crash happened about 30 - 45 minutes before the timestamp of the comment that mentions the crash.  The second crash was about 15 minutes before the timestamp.

Thank you very much for spending your time with this.

[dariusd]

I've spent some time studying the logs and I am a bit stumped... nothing about this failure is quite like anything I have seen before.  I don't quite know what to suggest.

The guest panic is unusual.  I assume that your host machine is otherwise reliable – no host hangs or host crashes or unexpected restarts?  I would be interested in seeing any other guest panic reports which you have.  They will be in among the files in the guest's /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports and will all have panic in their name.  Usually the system will keep reports from the last month or so.

It might be worthwhile building a new Sierra VM without VMware Tools (or perhaps uninstalling VMware Tools from your existing VM, after taking a snapshot for ease of "reinstallation") and see if the problem continues in the absence of VMware Tools.

--

Darius

[country_bebop]

Sorry it took so long to respond.

I built a new Sierra VM and installed all updates.  I did not install VMware tools.

I first tried to mount the LaCie firewire drive with a USB adapter cable.  It still took about 2-3 minutes to mount.  I examined the contents of the drive.  No crash.

I then tried to mount the LaCie Thunderbolt drive with a USB adapter cable.  It never mounted.  I opened Disk Utility and the drive wasn't there.  I selected the boot disk in the sidebar, VMware Virtual SATA Hard Drive Media, and clicked on the Info button in the tool bar.  It crashed with first the black screen which changed to a gray screen with VMware in the center.  I restarted and after logging in I was told that it crashed and there was a report.  At some point there was a black screen with many languages saying to press any key to continue but I'm not sure if it was when it crashed or after the crash.

I've attached the same files you asked for before.

This exercise reminded me of a possibly related problem.  This has to do with file sharing and connecting to a drive on another computer over the local network.  About 10% of the time I am sharing another Mac's files, when I'm finished and eject the shared drive, its icon, and possibly its eject button in the sidebar, fade but don't go away.  I have to shutdown or restart to get it to go away (logout and login generally doesn't work).  This happened today and I shutdown in order to respond to you.  There might be something about that in the log, too. 

Thank you

[SparkyzFan]

I have a LaCie rugged thunderbolt/USB3 external drive connected to MacBook Air by a USB/ thunderbolt3 adapter that won't mount.  It appears to be "connected" in the settings portion of the VM, but, will not show up in Disk utilities or on the sidebar.  I never hear it spin up when I "connect" it in the VM.  When I "disconnect" it in the VM I immediately hear it spin up when the host detects it.  Is there some sort of usb power limitation with Fusion?  I have VMware fusion 12 player and am running Catalina (host) with Mojave (guest) on a macbook air. 

[ColoradoMarmot]

Make sure it's connected as USB and not thunderbolt.  The latter isn't virtualized.

[SparkyzFan]

It is connected as USB.