Opening a VMWare Workstation system in Fusion

[kmgillen]

I use VMWare workstation extensively, and now have Fusion running on my Mac. I want to open one of my existing images created and used on my PC with Fusion (all are stored on external USB HDD's).

When in Fusion, i click File --> Open and locate my machine (.vmx file). it shows up in my list, but when i click Open, I get the message "No permission to access this virtual machine. Configuration files: /volumes/<disk>/machines/JSE/JSE.vmx"

is this possible? If so, how?

I could not find any security settings in either Fusion or my Workstation systems to set this.

This is a Windows XP session. I've got Workstation 6 running o my PC, and Fusion Version 1.1.1 (72241) running on my MacBookPro.

~KMG

[admin · Accepted solution]

How are your USB drives formatted? By default, OS X cannot write to NTFS drives, which would cause the error you see. One workaround would be to copy your virtual machines to an internal drive.

[kmgillen]

etung,

Thanks for the tip! Having the data on an NTFS formatted drive was the issue. I copied it to a FAT32 drive and it is now letting me access the system.

Thanks! :smileygrin:

[admin]

For anyone who comes across this thread later, remember that FAT32 has a 4 GB limit on filesize, so if you want to store a virtual machine on a FAT32-formatted drive, you probably want to use the split disk format.

[kmgillen]

Forgive my ignorance, but where would I check / change that setting?

Thanks,

Kevin

[admin]

Look at the .vmdk disk files - if you're coming from Win/Lin, this is easy, if you're coming from Mac, you need to peer inside the .vmwarevm bundle as noted in .

If you see files with names like "SomeDisk-s001.vmdk", you have a split disk. If you only have something like "SomeDisk.vmdk", you have a monolithic disk. Fusion comes with vmware-vdiskmanager that can convert between them, I'm sure Workstation has a similar tool.