Fusion: Passing through a physical SATA drive?

[stooovie]

Can I add a physical SATA drive to a Windows 10 VM in Fusion/Fusion Player? I can't find an option to do that. Thanks.

[bluefirestorm · Accepted solution]

I have not tried/use VMs with raw disk for some time. You can try the instructions in this KB.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2097401

You don't have to follow it to set to ide, You can change to scsi or sata but have to change the steps accordingly.

If the SATA disk/partition that you intend to add to a VM is a macOS filesystem (APFS), access might be denied to the VM. I can't remember the steps that is needed to allow it (and whether it will even work in Catalina/Big Sur).

[stooovie]

I'm trying to get a SATA drive to retain a D letter because of games and some After Effects/Premiere projects that expect assets to be on a D path. I can't make my VMware Shared Folder to mount as D.

I'll try and report back, thank you!

[ColoradoMarmot]

Have you tried using subst from a command prompt?

[stooovie]

I'm unable to create the rawdiskfile, even if the command should be ok:

/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk4 fullDevice /Users/stooovie/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/rawDiskFile ide 

I'll probably just abandon the idea, thanks for your help.

EDIT: I changed the drive letter in natively booted Windows to Y:, so that when ran as VM, the "VMware-shared" folder also maps as Y:, making most of the issue go away.

[bluefirestorm]

It is hard to help you remotely as I don't know  what your exact configuration is and target VM, macOS path names.

But from what I can see, the escaping of the space in the path name is missing (in red)

/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk4 fullDevice /Users/stooovie/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/Virtual\ Machines/Boot\ Camp/rawDiskFile ide

[stooovie]

This indeed worked! I have haphazardly copied the path from Get Info window, guess that doesn't work.

The raw drive is now mounted and working! Thank you so much 🙂