Fusion claims there is no system in Virtual machine.

[hjgunn]

After quite a few problems trying to increase the size of the original virtual machine's HD Fusion stopped recognizing the VM's contents as a Windows XP Professional startup disk.

I therefore created a new VM and now need to access the contents of the old VM to get the clients data out of it, which he unfortunately saved inside the VM's hard disk.

Where do I get the VMDK mounter which I understand is the way to go.

Kind regards

Hans J. Gunnarsson

[gbullman]

VMDK mounter is installed when you first install Fusion 2.0.x, and it is accessible through Finder. When a Virtual Machine is shut down you can right click on the bundle in Finder and one of the Open With options should be VMDK mounter. I will warn you though from your post there is a good chance you wiped out the partition when trying to extend it. Hopefully you backed up the VM before trying to expand its's disk, assuming you did you may want to go back and use these instructions on the backup of your VM;

Basically the Fusion tools allow you to increase the size of your virtual disk. However that does not affect the logical disk partition which is managed by Windows. For Windows XP you need to use the recommended steps in the referenced document, or you need to back up the contents of the disk, use windows tools to expand the partiion, and then restore the contents (much better off using the instructions). I understand that Vista has the ability to expand the partition without the use of 3rd party tools.

Unfortunately, if you do not have any backups you may have inadvertently wiped out your data with the technique you used to increase the disk partition within Windows.

Good Luck.

[hjgunn]

Thank you for your input

I started out with version 2.0 and upgraded to the newest version during the process.

The client simply asked if we could create a new larger disk. I looked for a control panel to create a new drive and stumbled over the disk icons at the bottom of the screen. I clicked on it and saw the slider. I tried moving it and it gave me an error that I had to delete all snapshots I told it to delete the snapshots and it crashed after about an hour. I restarted the computer and the virtual machine and behold all snapshots were gone.

I tried again to move the slider and got the same message although there were no more snapshots.

I then suspected that the 2.0 version was buggy and upgraded to version 2.0.2.

I was still unable to move the slider.

I then created a new snapshot and deleted it again. This caused the slider to become active.

Not once was there a warning that this might be a fatal thing to do. I think this is a very serious flaw in the software.

VMDK mounter was not installed during the initial setup. I did a search for VMDK and found not a single instant.

I looked into the virtual file and it still contains all the parts that make up the FAT partition.

Are you telling me that I may yet have lost all the data although the size of the VM file is the same as it was before?

If so, is there some way to recover the data since it seems to still be there albeit inaccessible by Fusion?

Reading your instructions tells me that I performed the first part just as you describe and actually turned the size back to what it was before I started.

Yet the VM claims it cant find an operating system in that machine.

Kind regards

Hans

[admin]

VMDK mounter was not installed during the initial setup. I did a search for VMDK and found not a single instant.

It should be located in /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/VMDKMounter.app. Is it there?