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xbyzantium
Contributor
Contributor
‎11-17-2007 01:58 PM

Accessing Mac formatted data drives

Just downloaded VMWare Fusion 1.1 to test it out on my 24" iMac with Leopard (fully patched). The hard disk is partitioned three ways - Mac Boot drive, Boot camp partition (which is running Vista Business using Fusion) and a Mac formatted data partition. Is it possible to access the data partition within the VM? if not, does Fusion support third party tools such as MacDrive? I need to run various apps within the Windows VM but the data files i need to access are all sitting on the 'Data' partition. Thanks.

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2 Replies
rcardona2k
Immortal
Immortal
‎11-17-2007 02:07 PM

MacDrive works under Boot Camp but under a VM it requires special virtual disks that reference host raw partitions created by a tool called vmware-rawDiskCreator. That's fairly advanced.

The VMware way to access host drives is to create Shared Folders (Virtual Machine > Settings > Shared Folders).

The OS way is to turn Windows Sharing that for your home directory. You have to use a third-party util to add more share points like on your OS X data volume (Shift Share and SharePoints). I don't know if those utilities are Leopard compatible. Worst case you have to edit smb.conf, if you're comfortable with that.

IMO, Windows Sharing is most compatible, VMware Shared Folder is most convenient.

BP9906
Expert
Expert
‎11-17-2007 08:03 PM

Out of pure experience, I've had troubles with File sharing data files from OSX using programs in XP. My understanding of this problem is more of the program in XP being able to properly handle data files via remote share (ie. not VMware's problem).

A great example is Quicken 2006 (windows). If I open up my QDF file via shared folder in XP VM for Quicken to open, Quicken bombs right away.

I'm very more inclined to use the rawdisk creator option, but again, as Richard mentioned, its difficult to setup at first, but works great.

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