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jjmoorman
Contributor
Contributor

harddisk not found

i have a bootcamp parition on my 1st harddisk together with my osx

my 2nd harddisk ( internal) i formatted in osx as a windows NTFS disk

i also have an usb extarnal drive

if i start bootcamp i see the drive c - the drive d (2nd drive ) - and the drive f ( extarnal )

if i start fusion it gives me the option to start the bootcamp partition - very nice.

when it start it doensnt see the 2nd harddisk - drive d is gone.

can anybody help ?

thanks

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WoodyZ
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Immortal

You would have to manually add a second raw disk to the Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine as there is no way to do it through the Fusion UI.

Search using: add raw disk boot camp

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jjmoorman
Contributor
Contributor

can you give me an indication on how or where i do this ?

i' m new to osx and to vmware - so i'm at a loss.

i tried to google my way arround - but ended up nowhere.

thank you very much for having answerd me.

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WoodyZ
Immortal
Immortal

Okay here is what I did...

In the Search Community text box (in the upper right hand corner of every page in this Forum) I typed "add raw disk boot camp" (without the quotes) and pressed Enter.

Next I read several posts.

Note: I have a MacBook Pro and it only has one hard disk so I attached a Firewire Drive that has 2 partitions, 1 NTFS and 1 HFS+ in order to process the commands and add a second disk to my Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine. I used System Profiler (/Applications/Utilities/System Profiler) to get the BSD Name of the Firewire Drive as it's needed in the <diskDev> argument of the vmware-rawdiskCreator command.

From what I read I needed to use the vmware-rawdiskCreator command so in a Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) I typed the following command:

$ "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator" print /dev/disk2

The output of which was:

Note: I do not store my Normal Fusion Virtual Machine's in the Default Location and the Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine is in a different location then the normal Virtual Machine however I would store the .vmdk files for the 2nd disk in the same location as my normal Virtual Machine and keep a backed up copy prior to use so in the event of having to rebuild the metadata for the Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine. So the <virtDiskPath> argument of the vmware-rawdiskCreator command reflects that.

Next I typed the following command:

$ "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator" create /dev/disk2 1 "/Virtual Machines/BCVM_DISK2/disk2" ide

This created 2 files:

/Virtual Machines/BCVM_DISK2/disk2.vmdk

/Virtual Machines/BCVM_DISK2/disk2-pt.vmdk

I then edited the Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine's Boot Camp partition.vmx configuration file to include the following:

ide0:1.present = "TRUE"

ide0:1.fileName = "/Virtual Machines/BCVM_DISK2/disk2.vmdk"

Note: On my system the Boot Camp partition.vmx file is located at "/Users/WKZ/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm/Boot Camp partition.vmx" and I backed it up before editing it.

I then started my Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine and tested Reading/Writing to the newly added 2nd hard disk and all was okay!

Note: To understand about the Virtual Machine Bundle Package and editing the .vmx configuration file have a look at:

Note: For the syntax of the vmware-rawdiskCreator command just execute the command without any arguments.

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

The syntax for the create argument of the vmware-rawdiskCreator command is:

"/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator" create <diskDev> <partNum> <virtDiskPath> <adapterType>

And you can see what those arguments are from the output of the vmware-rawdiskCreator command executed without any arguments.

HTH

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jjmoorman
Contributor
Contributor

thank you somuch - pretty awesome

i got the first part but get stuck on :

I then edited the Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine's Boot Camp partition.vmx configuration file to include the following:

ide0:1.present = "TRUE"

ide0:1.fileName = "/Virtual Machines/BCVMDISK2/disk2.vmdk"_

can you tell me how i do this ?

is there an editor for this ?

thank you for your patients

jan

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

can you tell me how i do this ?

See for where to find the .vmx config file

is there an editor for this ?

Any text editor should be work.

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jjmoorman
Contributor
Contributor

it works ! - thank you very very much.

jan

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amobbs
Contributor
Contributor

Worked for me too - this is brilliant!

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mdmangus
Contributor
Contributor

Thank you so much for this article and pointing us to the rawdiskCreator tool! I almost gave up trying to get my external firewire drive that I had partitioned into a NTFS to be mounted in VMWare.

The VMWare settings interface gave no way to map it to a partition. It appeared I would have to use Shared Folders, but even this route didn't work since OS X only had read access to the NTFS volume. I almost thought I would have to purchase a 3rd party tool to allow the mac to write to it and even than I don't know if VMWare would utilize it.

Luckily, I came across this thread that allowed me to utilize the partition the way I wanted.

I have read/write access as intended.

Thank you!

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sderun
Contributor
Contributor

IT WORKS ! Excellent ! thank for this tutorial !

But..... during the drive is virtualized in Fusion session, it is not enable with os/x. Any miraculous idea for that ?? Smiley Happy

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WoodyZ
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But..... during the drive is virtualized in Fusion session, it is not enable with os/x. Any miraculous idea for that ?? Smiley Happy

That behavior is normal and to be expected as only one OS can control the hard drive at a time. You can however create a share in the Guest OS and access that share via the Go > Connect to Server... command using the following convention...

smb://Computer_Name/Share_Name or smb://IP_Address/Share_Name

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Dardens
Contributor
Contributor

I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to carefully document your vmware-rawdiskCreator procedure!

It seems to me that we can use your method to migrate a virtual disk to a physical disk.

Cheers, Steve

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WoodyZ
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It seems to me that we can use your method to migrate a virtual disk to a physical disk.

Maybe I'm reading what you wrote wrong however I see nothing in what I documented that would enable one to migrate a virtual disk to a physical disk.

What I documented enables a partition on a physical drive a.k.a a RAW Disk to be accessed directly by a Virtual Machine by creating a virtual hard drive that is really not much more then the meta data needed to access the physical disk directly.

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Dardens
Contributor
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> Maybe I'm reading what you wrote wrong however I see nothing in what I documented that would enable one to migrate a virtual disk to a physical disk.

I could easily be missing something, but my thought was that once one has R/W access to a physical disk, it just requires an OS copy of the entire virtual disk to the physical disk? An XP copy may not handle all permissions correctly, and certainly wouldn't work for open system files -- but would it not work for unopened application and data files? At least for those that have no hated Registry entanglements?

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WoodyZ
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First of all my reply to the OP's question had to deal with giving RAW Access to a Partition on a Physical Hard Drive that was not an OS System Volume and further more XP does not have the ability to Image a Hard Drive Physical or Virtual containing an OS System Volume and write it back to itself or the other and or visa versa. This requires 3rd Party Software and in the case of going from P2V or V2P it additionally requires adding/removing drivers and or information in the Windows Registry in the case of a Windows OS. That's not to say that you can't Partition and Format the Target first and then boot with a Live OS CD/DVD and do a simple file copy from one to the other however it will not work by just that because a file by file copy doesn't ensure that the necessary drivers for the different hardware will be in place as well as necessary configuration information as in entries in the Windows Registry as an example. There are ways to manually inject the necessary Divers and Configuration Information however it requires knowing what one is doing and how to do it otherwise the use of 3rd Party products designed to do this are necessary or attempting a repair install to correct the differences and this doesn't alway work without a manual nudge here and there too.

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Dardens
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Sorry Woody -- I just figured out the confusion, caused by my writing "virtual disk" instead of fully-qualified "virtual non-OS data/applications disk". I.e., a 😧 drive, not a C: drive. I am working on configuring my new Fusion VM to conform to my normal Windows config where C: contains nothing but Windows installation. 😧 contains nothing but apps/docs -- fortunately for me, absent Registry entanglements.

My original thank-you comment was just noting that I can probably use your physical drive attachment method to migrate the virtual 😧 to a physical 😧

For backup and imaging of NTFS volumes under OS X I usually recommend Netrestore or Winclone.

For Windows imaging I have licenses for Ghost Corporate and Acronis True Image 10. The latter is usually much easier to get the work done. Neither will run on Apple EFI firmware. Both may well run atop Fusion VM, but I haven't had a need so haven't tested. If True Image will run atop Fusion and can thus see an attached physical drive, that could offer a path from virtual back to physical should we need it.

Thanks again for all your tips!

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