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kevin881
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Installing Boot Camp AFTER having VMWare Fusion installed.

Hi, I am a new mac user. The "genius" at my store sold me VMWare Fusion, which I have been very happy with so far. Migrating over from Windows was scary, and Fusion provided me with the security I needed to take the plunge.

One thing is that I am an architect, and all the drafting software that my collegues use is Autodesk Autocad. So, I really have the need to boot up my Mac in Boot Camp to do some drafting now and then.

The problem is that I installed Fusion before installing Boot Camp, which I have not done yet. I was told by the "genius" that Boot Camp and Fusion can share data... but I cannot figure out if that is possible to do NOW in my situation.

Directions to a FAQ or help posted here would be greatly appreciated.

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admin
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Is it as simple as just deleting the file that is in: Documents > Virtual Machines > Windows XP Professional (this was what I named it)?

Yes, that is correct.

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ctakim
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I am in the same situation as Kevin. I can get both running but not from the same partition and installation. Any help would be appreciated.

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kevin881
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Bump for an answer to this question... does anyone know if it is possible to do this? If its impossible, feel free to reply... thanks!

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ctakim
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For what its worth, I went back to square one, loaded Boot Camp and then reloaded Fusion to recognize the Boot Camp partition. Not the answer I wanted, but now the problem is gone. Good luck!

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kevin881
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Yeah, I think I am gonna have to bite the bullet and do that... bloody hell.

By the way, are you using Leopard?

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admin
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Sorry for not responding earlier, but the problem is that your question is a bit vague, and addressing it properly takes some effort. The big questions are what you want to share, what your current setup is, and what your restrictions are. I'll assume you have one OS X partition and one Boot Camp partition. You say you already have a normal VM created. That VM can share data with OS X by using Shared folders or network shares. If your Boot Camp partition is FAT, your shared folder could be located on the Boot Camp partition (OS X can't write NTFS by default).

Once you boot natively to Windows, you can't access anything on the OS X partition (Windows can't even read HFS+ by default). However, if your shared folder was on the Boot Camp partition, you're good to go.

The problematic setup is if your Boot Camp partition is NTFS. The simplest solution in this case would be to use a USB drive to share data. You could also attach the raw disk to the VM, since Windows knows how to write NTFS.

Another possibility is that your wording was poor and you're actually asking how to turn a normal virtual machine into a Boot Camp partition, which has not been done successfully to my knowledge.

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ctakim
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Yep, just updated my home macs to Leopard and was trying to get Windows XP Pro and Mac OS 10.5 running on my Intel Macs.

I think what Kevin and I were both trying to do is convert a virtual machine installation of Windows using Fusion into a Boot Camp partition so you can use the same Windows desktop from native booting in Boot Camp or via virtualization from the Mac OS. That is what I'm doing now, but I had to start again from scratch loading Windows via Boot Camp and then starting VMware's Fusion. For what it is worth using Tiger and Parallels you could do things in the opposite order (set up your Windows environment virtually first, then set up Boot Camp). It is just loading all those Windows updates that is a pain in the @ss.

To etung: I now have the set up I wanted and I'm impressed. Of course it may be due to the fact that I have 4GB of RAM in my new iMac, but the Fusion virtualization is very fast (no, I'm not running games) and I'm very impressed. I will be purchasing this for my long term use. Thanks for making a test version free to users in advance and for the forum advice. You have made a very nice product.

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admin
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I think what Kevin and I were both trying to do is convert a virtual machine installation of Windows using Fusion into a Boot Camp partition so you can use the same Windows desktop from native booting in Boot Camp or via virtualization from the Mac OS. That is what I'm doing now, but I had to start again from scratch loading Windows via Boot Camp and then starting VMware's Fusion.

In that case, my advice would have been to do what you're already done, start with a fresh install. Going from Boot Camp partition to a normal file-based VM is not too bad, but the other direction doesn't work (my understanding is it's a driver issue, possibly solvable but a hassle and nobody's been able to do it). I'm glad to hear that Fusion is working well for you!

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kevin881
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Well, thats what I ended up doing. Lucky me, my windows license expired with this latest installation... oh well.

Now my only question is how do I delete the VMFusion Windows partition that I will not be using (the non-boot camp one)?

Is it as simple as just deleting the file that is in: Documents > Virtual Machines > Windows XP Professional (this was what I named it)?

Thanks.

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admin
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Is it as simple as just deleting the file that is in: Documents > Virtual Machines > Windows XP Professional (this was what I named it)?

Yes, that is correct.

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kevin881
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Thanks ETung

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kevin881
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Okay... last question:

When I boot up my iMac, there is an "unnamed" drive on my desktop. This is the Boot Camp partition I have just installed. I can click on it and see all the windows XP folders... and so on. When I run VMWare Fusion, and tell it to run the Boot Camp partition, the drive disappears off my desktop. When I close Fusion, the drive does not reappear.

Is this normal behavior for the Boot Camp / VMWare Fusion situation?

Thanks

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ctakim
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I've noticed a bit of peekaboo with my drive, too. I renamed it Boot Camp but sometimes it is not visible on the desk top. It doesn't seem to impede any function, though.

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kevin881
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Yep, that pretty much describes what I am experiencing... "peek a boo."

Anyone else notice it?

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admin
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When I run VMWare Fusion, and tell it to run the Boot Camp partition, the drive disappears off my desktop. When I close Fusion, the drive does not reappear.

Is this normal behavior for the Boot Camp / VMWare Fusion situation?

Yes. The drive disappears because otherwise there might be consistency issues if you were to access files in both OSes at the same time. Not reappearing afterwards is a bug (well, rather a missing feature) - a workaround is that you can get the drive to reappear my using Disk Utility to mount the partition after Fusion is done with it.

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kevin881
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ctakim,

how the heck did you rename your drive "boot camp?"

I have gone to the drive > right click > get info, but it will NOT let me rename the drive. Is there another way to do this that I do not know about?

Thanks.

Kevin

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rcardona2k
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To change the name all I did was boot up the Boot Camp partition in Fusion, get properties of C: change the volume label from (blank) to "Boot Camp". Shutdown the VM. When OS X re-mounts it's called Boot Camp.

Since OS X doesn't handle writing to NTFS volumes, I'm not sure if Apple supports changing the volume label.

kevin881
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Thanks so much... that did it!

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