How to access Bootcamp HD from Mac once Fusion VM is started

[alyanm]

I have VMWare Fusion 4.0.2 installed on Mac OS Lion with VMWare running my bootcamp (Win 7 64 bit).  When I first boot my Mac I can see and access my bootcamp HD and the files therein, but once I startup the bootcamp VM the disk is no longer accessible.

I know how to share files in the VM so that my Windows can access Mac folders.  How do I setup the reverse, so I can open up a word document from the bootcamp hd on my Mac side?

[WoodyZ · Accepted solution]

As long as the Guest OS (in your case the Boot Camp partition running as a Virtual Machine) has Network Connectivity then basically this has nothing to do with VMware Fusion per se in that with having Network Connectivity this become an OS issue regardless of whether it is running on a Physical Machine or as a Virtual Machine.  You need to share a resource, like your Home Folder in Windows and then access it like any other Shared Resource on the Network.  How to do this is covered in both the Host and Guest OSes Help Files.

[alyanm]

Thanks for the tip.  I am seeing the VM as a network device so that's an improvement, now that I changed to Bridged instead of NAT.

[AKostur]

If I understand your question correctly, before launching the VM, you can see your bootcamp partition on your Mac desktop (or similar location, like under /Volumes).  But once you launch the VM it goes away, yes?

This is expected behaviour.  A lot of filesystems cannot deal with two operating systems (well, OS instances... doesn't matter if it's even the same OS...) accessing them at the same time.  So if VMware didn't take away your access to your bootcamp partition when your VM was running, this is what would be happening.  Mac OS X could be making changes to the disk at the same time as your VM.   This is not the same as sharing your bootcamp disk from your VM via network shares, or even VMware's shared directories (which as I understand is basically a special case of network shares).  This is because when the OS X would want to change anything, it is asking the VM's OS to make the changes on its behalf.  The VM's OS can still make sure that the contents of the disk stays sane since at the end of the day, only the VM's OS is making the actual reads and writes to the disk (partition/volume).

[alyanm]

AKostur: I see your point, I guess that makes sense.  Since I can get in through network share, that is sufficient for my purposes.  I just wanted to cut out a few steps in transfering files back and forth from Windows where many of my tools live.