Problem restoring Virtual Machine after hard drive swap

[PTKev]

I had been running Windows XP Pro SP2 under Fusion v. 1.1.1 on a MacBook Intel Duo Core with 2GB of RAM and everything worked perfectly. I recently swapped out my 80GB HD on the Mac for a new 200GB drive and restored the entire drive from Time Machine. Everything transferred fine and all my apps work, except that when I open Fusion, there are no Virtual Machines listed. I still have the old drive that I put into an external case so I can use it as an external drive. When I open Fusion from that drive, the Virtual Machine with Windows XP is there, but I get a pop up window that says that the program has been moved and it wants me to say whether it was "moved" or "copied." I didn't answer the question and instead shut down Fusion because I don't want to give the wrong answer and have it affect my ability to restore the VM.

Can someone tell me how I restore the Windows VM as well as the applications that I had running under Windows on the Virtual Machine without having to reinstall the programs (I'll run into license issues if I do that)?

Thank you!

[admin · Accepted solution]

There was a bug in 10.5.0/10.5.1 which caused OS X to freeze if a certain type of file was backed up by Time Machine while in use. Fusion 1.1.1 thus excludes virtual machines from being backed up by Time Machine. This should have been documented better. The Apple bug has since been fixed, and more recent versions of Fusion lift the Time Machine exclusion.

Since you still have the old drive, simply copy the virtual machines from it to the new drive. When you run them from the new location, select "moved" ("copied" implies that you'll be using both the original and the copy simultaneously).

[PTKev]

Thank you very much. I'll try that right now.

[WoodyZ]

First of all do not run Fusion from the External Drive unless you're actually booting the OS from that Drive. Fusion need's to be installed and run from the same partition that the OS is running from.

Second just locate the Virtual Machine Bundle Package on the Old Drive and move it to the New Drive or you can leave it on the old drive and run the Virtual Machine from there but run Fusion from the Primary Drive. To get the Virtual Machine to show in the Virtual Machine Library window just double-click the target Virtual Machine to run it and it will populate the Virtual Machine Library window in the process.

The answer in either case is "I moved it" so as to keep the same MAC Address otherwise changing the MAC Address can help trigger WPA.

[PTKev]

IT WORKED! I copied the VM file to the new HD and it just WORKED! I love that. Thank you guys for all your help. I've very relieved.

[Tahoebob]

I recently upgraded my system drive from 250GB to 500GB. I used time machine and restored everything to the new disk. The hard drive settings on the new machine shows "0 GB" and Fusion only starts up from the file on the old hard disk. I then copied the .vmdk file to the new hard disk after naming the "new .vmdk" file as a backup. It still used the file on the old disk because if I renamed the old disk file Fusion refused to run.

All software has been updated as of last week.

I want to remove the old 250GB hard drive, but need Fusion to run.

Help!

[admin]

Is this a normal (as opposed to Boot Camp) virtual machine? Zip and attach the .vmx config file and vmware.log (see for help locating them) for the virtual machine that doesn't run.

[Tahoebob]

Thanks. Yes, it is a normal virtual machine. I found that the earlier post that suggested changing the "copied" to "moved" solved my problem. All is working well and I have removed the 250GB drive.