Accepted Solutions
Hi,
Oh dear.. another Time Machine victim.
Please read my article:
https://www.vimalin.com/why-is-time-machine-not-a-good-backup-for-virtual-machines/
It is not entirely clear for me if you did a clean install and then restored the VM from time machine or if the VM was preserved during the Catalina upgrade and that you tried to "repair" the VM with Time Machine. Did you make a copy of the VM before you started a repair?
Since you can still boot, the VM disk still has all required parts to function, so there's at least some good news.
For the rest, without any logs, it is hard to say much sensible about the disk itself.
In order to get your data out I would try the following path:
1. Consider the VM dead
2. Create a new VM that you can boot into and use
3. Attach the virtual disk from your dead VM to the new VM and try if you can get some of the data from it.
You might be lucky or not, it all depends on how badly Time Machine messed up the virtual disk.
All the best luck, I will keep my fingers crossed for you.
--
Wil
Hi,
Oh dear.. another Time Machine victim.
Please read my article:
https://www.vimalin.com/why-is-time-machine-not-a-good-backup-for-virtual-machines/
It is not entirely clear for me if you did a clean install and then restored the VM from time machine or if the VM was preserved during the Catalina upgrade and that you tried to "repair" the VM with Time Machine. Did you make a copy of the VM before you started a repair?
Since you can still boot, the VM disk still has all required parts to function, so there's at least some good news.
For the rest, without any logs, it is hard to say much sensible about the disk itself.
In order to get your data out I would try the following path:
1. Consider the VM dead
2. Create a new VM that you can boot into and use
3. Attach the virtual disk from your dead VM to the new VM and try if you can get some of the data from it.
You might be lucky or not, it all depends on how badly Time Machine messed up the virtual disk.
All the best luck, I will keep my fingers crossed for you.
--
Wil
Hi,
I haven't used macFuse or Paragorn in about 5 years, so I can't comment on that as things have changed in the disk format.
There's also significant changes in macOS in regards to how drivers are handled.
Yes that used to work.
What I suggested was to create a new VM and install Windows in there.
No additional software is needed. What we're going to do is comparable in the physical world to taking the disk out of the broken computer and putting it in the new computer.
Once Windows 10 is installed you can shut down the VM and go to the menu "Virtual Machine"-> "Settings"-> Top right button "Add Device" and select "Existing Hard Disk"
That will popup a File selector dialog and then you'll navigate to the bundle of your old VM.
If you have enough free disk space then "Make a new copy" is the safest option, "share" is a good second option.
If you see multiple .vmdk files you can select from then you likely have a snapshot open and you should only experiment with "make a new copy" (don't use either of the other copies or more repairs will be needed, VMware Fusion tends to do the right thing here and disable those dangerous options if the disk is part of a snapshot chain)
If you don't know which vmdk to choose then attach the vmware.log files from your vm to a reply here (the vmware.log files can be found in the VM's bundle folder, select the VM, right click ->
"Show package contents")
--
Wil
Hi,
Glad to hear it worked out in the end!
Your issue is exactly why I wrote Vimalin.
There is a free version of the application if needed.
Here is a recent testimonial from a user who switched from Time Machine to Vimalin for his VM backups: https://www.vimalin.com/must-have-utility/
--
Wil
Hi,
Next version of VMware Fusion when run on macOS Big Sur will use the native hypervisor framework from apple.
So at least it should be able to run on Apple Silicon.
This however is not the same as being able to run your intel based virtual machines on top of Apple Silicon.
I know that VMware Fusion has a lot of requests for exactly that kind of support, but can't tell you anything about if they will even try to implement this or if it is do-able.
We will have to wait and see what comes out of their pipeline.
They have amazing engineers and a lot of technical knowledge on the matter, so there's at least some hope they can pull this off.
--
Wil
Like Wil said we're not ready to make announcements around that just yet, but what I would say is maybe hold off buying that windows PC for a little longer 
@MarioRaffaele wrote:
Can you confirm if I am doing everything right ?
Sounds about right. If you don't have snapshots then it would be correct, if you have snapshots then you might not have the latest data.
At least by making a copy of the data, you are not risking to break more... so I would let it work and do something else until it is done.
PS: Please do not put log files in a pdf, that's unreadable for us. If you have problems attaching a log file then use compress / zip in order to be able to upload it. Sadly the forum software has never been updated to allow uploading of plain log files.
--
Wil
