MacBook running Fusion 4.1.3 had WinXP with 2 partitions until it was upgraded to OS X El Capitan

[PAugust]

Hi

I'd really appreciate some advice.

My dear friend has had someone else kindly upgrade his MacBook Pro, out of the blue.

It went from Mountain Lion to El Capitan - OS X 10.11.6. Now - unsurprisingly - it's saying it can't run VMW Fusion ver 4.1.3.

He has a legacy MSDOS program which he has done a great deal of work on preserving precious Tibetan traditions and saving the documents to a root directory location.

There is a 12 gb folder under Virtual disks labelled "Windows XP Professional" which I have backed up to an external hard drive.

I'm happy to upgrade, but I'm worried that might not fix it and even make things worse.

Some authoritative advice would come in really handy.

Regards

peter

Dunedin

[wila]

Hello Peter,

Welcome at the VMware community forums.

You are correct. VMware Fusion 4 will not run under El Capitan, you will have to upgrade to the latest version of Fusion for getting access to your virtual machines again.

No need to be  afraid of upgrading making it more worse. Your virtual machines will run under Fusion 8.

The steps for you to take are:

- uninstall VMware Fusion 4

- download + install Fusion 8 (the latest version)

- Boot your VM, Fusion will ask to upgrade your virtual hardware. That's usually a good idea, but beware that if you want to take the VM to an older version of Fusion that you will have to downgrade the virtual hardware again before uninstalling Fusion 8.

Also note that it will upgrade to the latest version of VMware Tools on first boot of your VM (except for your MS DOS VM which does not have VMware Tools)

Download link is here:

Try VMware Fusion or Fusion Pro. Run Windows on a Mac without rebooting.

That's a 30 day evaluation, but it is the normal download. You just need a license to activate Fusion after 30 days.

It is indeed always a good idea to backup your virtual machines to an external disk.

Do not depend on Time Machine for that as it doesn't create reliable backups for virtual machine packages.

--

Wil

[PAugust]

Thanks Wila

Good to get some actual support for software.

I did run into a bit of trouble though.

I stopped everything as well as I could via searching activity monitor, since I couldn't run it and stop it properly.

Then I uninstalled, finding quite  lot of those files in Library.

Install worked ok, until I got to select installation method. I tried to import an existing virtual machine. My old 4.1.3 one was visible, but it was greyed out.

I'm a bit stuck now.

Regards peter

[PAugust]

Oh, my bad.

Easier than I thought.

Just tried the bottom option of create custom.

It did something and then I ran my old system and it goes good as. And yes it did ask for an upgrade.

Thanks

peter

[wila]

Hi,

I'm just another user, not support

As for trying to use "import" that's not meant for opening virtual machines from previous versions, but for importing virtual machines from another virtualisation platform.

See the "?" help button in this screen:

Importing Windows Virtual Machines

You can import into VMware Fusion virtual machines that you created with Parallels Desktop, Microsoft Virtual PC, as well as virtual machines using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

VMware Fusion can import virtual machines created with the following versions of Parallels, Microsoft Virtual PC, or OVF:

Also you mentioned:

I stopped everything as well as I could via searching activity monitor, since I couldn't run it and stop it properly.

Then I uninstalled, finding quite  lot of those files in Library.

It should have been enough to just drag the VMware Fusion icon from Applications to the trash bin.

The files that are still left would then be cleaned up and used by the install to locate your current virtual machines (so that you don't have to go and find them)

Anyways.. I understand the confusion, the import screen isn't very clear on what virtual machines it will import, maybe it should allow you to open unregistered VMware virtual machines too.

The way to get your virtual machine back is to use menu option File -> Open

That will register your virtual machine again and after that you can run it.

--

Wil