More problems with Vista VM (disk conversion didn't get recognized!)

[inspiron2]

I have three VM's, all created using the VMWare Workstation XP version.

XP SP3

W2003 SP2

Vista SP1

Originally (under XP), these VM's disks were created using dynamically grow method, and all in a single file (i.e. do NOT split after 2GB). When I decided to try running these under my Mac OS X 10.5.5, I put them on a FAT32 disk I use to share data between XP and Mac.

Fusion originaly didn't start any of these VM's giving the message that disk files are larger than 2GB, and are not supported under the file system they are residing on (i.e. FAT32). That's fine.

From one of the VMWare posts, I came accross the suggestion to use vmware-vmdiskmanager to convert the virtual disk from a single file to 2GB splits. I did that for all three VM's.

For each of the VM's (i.e. XP, Vista, W2003) the single vmdk file was replaced by several vmdk file whose pre dot name ended in S001, S002, etc.

The problem is that the now XP and W2003 VM's run fine from FAT32 disk without giving the file too large error, but Vista still does gives that same error and refuses to run.

What else can I do to fix this problem--short of recreating VM from scratch?

(I could move the Vista VM to apple drive so that the 2GB limit is not an issue any more, but then I would have to maintain multiple copies of VM's, and I don't want to do that)

thx

[admin]

I came accross the suggestion to use vmware-vmdiskmanager to convert the virtual disk from a single file to 2GB splits. I did that for all three VM's.

Did you split the original virtual disks, or the ones on the FAT32 drive ? If you split the ones on the FAT32 drive, that might explain it - the FAT32 filesize limitation is 4 GB, and a fairly fresh XP (and maybe 2003, I don't know) would fall under that. Vista (by itself, much less anything you installed afterwards) is bigger. Larger files would get silently truncated, and splitting after the truncation won't recover your data - it's already gone. So XP and 2003 might work but Vista wouldn't.

The solution is to split disks before putting them on a FAT32 drive.

[inspiron2]

I split the ones on FAT32. I did another conversion using the files from the NTFS drive, and when I moved the resulting vmdk's to FAT32 parition, they ran fine. Thanks.

It is, however, strange that all three VM's were converted using files on FAT32, and all three were close to 4GB in size, but only Vista chose to act up.

Anyways, Vista has a reputation for a reason!