How to add my second drive to a converted Parallels VM?

[jwjohnson99]

I converted my Parallels VM with the VMWare Converter. I had two virtual drives in that VM. When running Fusion the first time I was able to bring up the C: drive, but not the second drive. I can see that the converter made two sets of .vmdk files in the folder I used for the conversion. How do I add the second virtual drive to my VMWare VM?

I'm using Fusion 1.1RC (build 61385)

Mac Pro 2.66 5GB RAM

Upgraded to Leopard prior to the Fusion install and the conversion.

The VM is running Windows XP Home SP2

Thanks for your help.

Jeff

[jim_gill]

You must edit your .vmx file with a text editor to add an existing virtual disk to a Fusion VM.

1) Open the .vmx file with TextEdit or another editor.

2) Find the lines that refer to your existing C:\ drive. These will look like

ide0:0.present = "TRUE"

ide0:0.fileName = "winxp.vmdk"

but you may see "scsi0:0" in place of the ide0:0 part.

3) Add two lines to refer to your other vmdk, following the pattern used for the vmdk containing your C:\ drive:

ide0:1.present = "TRUE"

ide0:1.fileName = "myother.vmdk"

Again, if your vmx file is using scsi drives, those names would be scsi0:1.present = "TRUE" and so on. There may be other lines mentioning ide0:0/scsi:0:0, but only the .present and .fileName lines are necessary to connect the virtual disk to the VM.

4) Save the .vmx file.

[rcardona2k]

Do your VMDKs truly have different names like Disk1.vmdk, Disk2.vmdk or Disk1.vmdk, Disk1-00001.vmdk? because the latter is not necessary the second drive, it could be part of the same C drive.

You can add a second virtual disk to your VMDK by going to Virtual Machine > Settings > + > Add Hard Disk. This will create a second, blank VMware disk but only for the purposes of populating the .vmx file with a placeholder. You can then open your VM's bundle, edit the .vmx changing the name of ide0:1.fileName from the placeholder to the second virtual disk's name (in my example that's Disk2.vmdk). After editing the vmx config file, delete the placeholder vmdk you created just to add the entries in the .vmx.

[rcardona2k]

dupe

[jwjohnson99]

Jim,

Thanks. I'll try that. Right now the virtual drive is broken up into 2GB segments. Do I just name the first Segment, or do I need to convert the segmented dive into one file?

My drive folders are called XP Home Parallels Conversion.vmdk, ....-f001.vmdk, ....f002.vmdk, etc to .f008.vmdk. Then there is a second set called XP Home Parallels Conversion (2).vmdk, ....(2)-f001.vmdk, ....(2)-f002.vmdk, etc to (2)-f008.vmdk. I am assuming that is the second drive?

[rcardona2k · Accepted solution]

Yes use the name of the first .vmdk segment, it should be a very small file (bytes).

[jwjohnson99]

Thanks to both of you for your input. I was able to get the second drive up and running after a couple of tries. It was where I had installed all my Microsoft Office programs, so was kind of important.

I'm new to the forum, so don't know exactly how this awarding points thing is supposed to work. If that's important, I would like to do what's right.

Jeff

[rcardona2k]

The point system is optional as a "reward" for contributions. You can award 10 points for the "correct" answer you believe solves the problem most correctly. You can also award 6 points to a helpful answer. These points are available once per thread, so it is preferable to open new issues instead of replying with new topics to existing ones.