Creating a VM on an external hard drive

[Cecile_GE]

Hello everyone,

I apologize in advance for my ignorance but I am in a rather urgent need of your help if I want to be able to work tomorrow...

I've downloaded VMware Fusion and want to create a VM (with Windows 11) on my external hard drive (it's an HDD with 3TB in total, 2TB available).

However, this hard drive contains a backup of all my important documents, photos, videos, etc. and I really want to make sure none of that will get deleted if I create a VM on that drive.

Can anyone please confirm that I can safely create a VM on my hard drive, or should I wait until I can get, for instance, a new SDD? (Until now I had a VM with Windows directly on my Macbook, but it was taking up too much space/memory and I had to get rid of it in order to do some much-needed updates).

Thank you so much for your help, as I said it's pretty urgent as I need to be able to work on Windows by tomorrow...

Cécile

[a_p_]

A virtual machine is basically just a document, that consists of multiple files which are stored in a folder.

Please be extremely careful with removing/ejecting the external drive, i.e. ensure that all cached data has been written to the external disk before you remove it, to avoid possible data corruption, or data loss in the VM.

André

[Cecile_GE]

Thank you!

I've successfully installed a VM with Windows 10 on my external hard drive (Windows 11 was too greedy, my Macbook Pro had too little RAM). Now I'm struggling to have the "full-screen" window actually fit my screen