I'm having problems migrating a XP home system to Mac OS X

[rgoldman]

I need some help. I'm new to the mac and I can't port over my Windows XP Home system.

This is what I did:

I installed Fusion onto the default Macintosh HD.

I set up sharepoints pointer to a 2 disk raid

On my XP box, I ran VMware converter and output the resulting files to the raid drive. I used the workstation 4.x option for the output. I tried the 5.x option, but I received errors and it wouldn't start. I remember about something about a power file, which it needed access to. When I pointed it to that file, it kept asking for it.

After I did the port, I opened the vmx file, and received the error: "VMFusion needs to store user preferences and other information in the directory "~/Library/Preferneces/VMwareFusion"

After I say to ignore the error, I receive the MS key message which I click ok.

I receive the debugging enabled messge (which by the way I have tried to turn off with no success....)

Finally, I receive the message "Cannot open disk "/Volumes/Raid/windows home/windows home.vnkd": Reached the host's limit for open files

I shutdown the system and try again....the same message shows up. I am running this as an Administrator...

Please help me...... I need help.....

[admin]

Sounds to me like you are confronting two independent problems.

The first one has to do with why importing to a Workstation-5-format VM didn't work. That one confuses me, so let's work on that one first. Not only will you be happier with a newer-format VM, but also we might be able to learn something from why your attempt to create one failed. Can you post a screenshot of the error message? I'm not sure exactly what you might be referring to by a "power file." So I'd love to see a picture. Attach it to your reply post, using the "Attach Files" button you'll see below the box where you type your reply.

As long as you are attaching things, could you also attach a Converter log file? Try a conversion to Workstation-5-format, let it fail, exit Converter, and then look in C:\WINDOWS\Temp\vmware-temp. Attach the newest[/i] file called "vmware-converter-?.log" (where ? is a number).

Your second problem has to do with the way Converter writes virtual hard disks. By default, it stores each virtual disk as a fleet of many files, each of which is guaranteed to never grow over 2 GB. This behavior is desirable when you're storing virtual disks on a FAT file system, which likes to misbehave with large files. (Of course, the virtual machine is oblivious to this trickery; it sees the virtual disk as the expected size.) But on the Mac, it can sometimes cause problems, because Macs (by default) limit the number of simultaneously open files to a much smaller number than other platforms.

Once we get past the above problem with converting to Workstation 5 format, we can merge the many-pieces-parts virtual disk into a one-big-part virtual disk. Richard Cardona posted instructions for doing that about halfway down in this thread:

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=575675