Sharing a USB 3 hard disk connected to the Host OS (Ventura) (intel based macbook) with a Win 10 VM

[Jim1234556]

I am running VMWare Fusion 13 Player on a 2018 macbook pro (intel processor) under Mac OS 13.1 Ventura as the host OS and Windows 10 as the guest/virtual machine OS.  I have an external hard drive connected to my mac via USB.  The external drive is "shared" with the virtual machine using the VM sharing settings.  When I boot up the VM and try to access the drive, Windows gives me an error saying I do not have permission to access the drive.  But if I go to the VM sharing settings, remove the drive and then immediately re-add it, I can access the drive just fine for the remainder on my session.  But when I reboot/restart the VM, I again lose access, etc.  Prior to upgrading to Mac OS Ventura, I was running Big Sur and using Fusion 12 Player and the same VM and same external USB drive and never had an issue with the VM having/losing access to the external drive.  When switching to Fusion 13 Player, I did enable "USB 3.1" in VM Settings->USB & Bluetooth->Advanced USB Options->USB Compatibility.

[Technogeezer]

By "VM sharing settings" what do you have configured in both the Sharing and USB & Bluetooth settings for your VM? 

[Jim1234556]

In Virtual Machine->Settings->Sharing, the external drive ("my book for mac") is listed like any other shared folder with read/write privileges:

I have some other shared folders which all work fine.  As for mirrored folders, only desktop is selected.

In Virtual Machine->Settings->USB & Bluetooth:

Note the drive ("my book for mac") is NOT connected via USB since I want this drive connected to my mac/host os.

Aside from the USB compatibility (which was previously set at USB 2.0), these are the exact same setting I used with Fusion 12 under Big Sur.  I had absolutely no issues and the external drive was always accessible.

Thanks

[ColoradoMarmot]

Is the drive plugged directly in or via a hub?  Apple made major changes in Monterey to the USB subsystem that rendered a lot of previous hubs unusable.  If it is, try plugging in directly to the machine and see if it happens.  If not, then it's a time to upgrade the hub (I've switched to CalDigit Element hubs - all of my old ones no longer work reliably).

[Jim1234556]

So, in fact, the drive was plugged in via a hub (an LG Thunderbolt Monitor with built in Thunderbolt/USB hub).  Note that at all times, the drive always mounted in the Mac OS without fail (I use it as a time machine drive and for direct file storage).  To test the suggestion that the USB hub was the issue, I plugged the drive directly into one of the available ports on my macbook.  Upon my first test, the drive was accessible in my VM without issue so I thought the USB hub might have been the issue as suggested.  Today, my second test, upon bootup, I again got the error that the drive was not accessible (and again solved by unsharing then resharing the drive via the sharing settings).  Note that, previously, with the drive connected to the USB hub, there was at least one occasion where it was successfully accessible in the VM on bootup, but most often it was not accessible.  So plugging directly into the computer did not solve the issue.  In retrospect, since the drive always mounted to the mac os when connected to the hub, I don't know that the hub would be the problem.  I could see it being a problem if the mac os had trouble accessing the drive.  At this point, I am likely to just stop using the drive from within the VM.

[Jim1234556]

One further note: updating to Fusion Player 13.01 did not help.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Three other thoughts:

1) Have you tried a different cable?

2) Have you tried a different drive?

3) What format is the external drive?  

[Jim1234556]

Unfortunately the drive uses a USB micro B to USB A cable (and is connected to the mac using a USB A-C adapter) and I don't have another one of those.  I also don't have another drive handy.  As previously noted, though, this drive has never failed to mount in the mac OS on boot up.  The drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (journaled).  It is old and I intend to replace it soon, likely with a thunderbolt drive.  I also have a Synology Diskstation NAS mounted in both the mac os and in the Windows VM and I have switched to using that in place of the USB drive.  So problem avoided but not solved.  This seems to be a problem with Fusion's sharing function, in my opinion, as unsharing and resharing the drive solves the issue until the next reboot.  Thanks for your help!

[RDPetruska]

Wait -- so you are attaching a drive to a Windows 10 VM which has a filesystem of MacOS Journaled?  I would expect that Windows, even if it sees the device, would believe the device is not formatted, since it likely will not recognize that filesystem.

[Technogeezer]

You wouldn't happen to have that USB drive enabled for file sharing in macOS, would you. Seems like I've seen some wonky behavior between macOS file sharing and Fusion folder sharing in the past. 

[Jim1234556]

Since I am using Fusion's sharing function to share the hard drive with the VM, just like any other folder on my mac OS, the format of the drive has never been an issue.  As I said, this worked flawlessly under Fusion 12/Big Sur for years.  I do not have Mac OS's file sharing enabled. I actually tried turning it on but it did not solve the problem with Fusion sharing the drive.  I am now trying a different experiment: instead of sharing the drive itself, I am sharing a sub-folder on the drive.  Today, I booted up the VM and that shared folder was accessible.  Of course, these one-off successes have happened before so only time will tell.

[ColoradoMarmot]

I just had a similar issue start with my ubuntu VM's - After a cold-boot I have to cycle sharing off and on to get them to show up.

Try testing with a shared folder on the internal hard drive.  That'll isolate if it's a fusion issue or a drive issue.

[Jim1234556]

Sharing a folder on the USB drive, rather than the drive (root level) itself, did not work. This morning I was unable to access the shared folder upon boot up.  At this point, I have to assume there is some bug in Fusion's sharing that, upon bootup, is unable to apply the sharing settings to a USB connected drive. Thanks for all of the help!

[ColoradoMarmot]

How about a folder on your internal hard drive?

My issue is on folders on the same drive as the VM itself.  Did you happen to upgrade to .3 ventura recently?  That seems to be when my issue started.

[Jim1234556]

Yes this all started with upgrading from Big Sur to Ventura (13) and, at the same time, upgrading from Fusion Player 12 to Fusion Player 13.  Currently at Ventura 13.1 as I have not yet installed the most recent update to 13.2.  Currently at Fusion Player version 13.01. 

During updating, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the only Fusion setting I changed was under Settings->USB&Bluetooth->Advanced USB Options->USB Compatibility: i enabled USB 3.1.  I did not change the "Hardware Version", currently at 19. But version 20 is available,  Though I will not pretend to understand the implications of upgrading the hardware version.

I am currently sharing three items from my main mac drive:  The drive itself (Macintosh HD), my user folder and my onedrive folder (I sync one drive to my mac and not in windows to keep my minimize my windows vm disk size).  All of these shares work perfectly.

One other note, in order to keep my VM file completely out of Time Machine, it is stored in a separate APFS volume of my main drive.  This is cleaner than just excluding the vm file from Time Machine as it further keeps Time Machine from even looking at it (which adds significant delays to backups).

[ColoradoMarmot]

Ahhh, ok.  Definitely exclude the onedrive folder from sharing.  That has known conflicts, and could (not guaranteed, but could) be causing the issue.

[Technogeezer]

@Jim1234556 the OneDrive client has changed a lot between running on Big Sur and Ventura. They had to rearchitect One Drive for Monterey and later to use new macOS APIs because the old ones they used in prior OneDrive versions were deprecated by Apple. It’s entirely possible that Fusion’s folder sharing was not built to handle the nuances that now are present with the new OneDrive client architecture. 

Given some of the new OneDrive client behavior on both macOS and Windows, there may not as much impact to the guest disk space than you might think. Standard operating procedure for a OneDrive client I s to use the files on demand feature that minimizes the file space actually consumed in the client’s file system by files stored in the cloud. You may want to revisit turning on OneDrive in the VM as alternative to using Fusion folder sharing on the OneDrive folder on your Mac. 

[Jim1234556]

For reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, I prefer not to operate onedrive in on-demand mode.  When I first upgraded to Ventura and updated onedrive, I did have issues sharing the folder with the vm due to the changes you noted in the the way the onedrive app and the os API's now work, e.g., the mount point of the onedrive folder is different under Ventura. But I did figure it out and have had no issues with accessing that folder from Windows via Fusion's sharing.  When I have a moment, I certainly will test whether sharing the onedrive folder is affecting the sharing of the USB hard drive but am pretty sure that is not the case (of course I have been wrong before). Thanks!

[Technogeezer]

Glad that you have gotten the OneDrive sharing to work the way you want it to. The changes did force folks to re-assess what they were doing with OneDrive in order to maintain existing workflows.