Wanting to share the same Windows XP VM between Fusion and Workstation 6

[bblencowe]

I'm not sure this is doable but I want to share the same Windows XP VM between VMware Workstation 6 running on Windows XP (which resides on my Boot Camp partition) and VMware Fusion. My desire is to be able to access the same VM regardless of which operating system I boot (Mac OS or Windows XP). I can navigate using Fusion to the .vmx file for my virtual machine (which resides under Windows XP) but when I try to run the VM, Fusion states "A serious error occured when accessing this virtual machine: No such file or directory".

Should this work??

Thanks in advance.

[Pat_Lee]

I'm not sure this is doable but I want to share the

same Windows XP VM between VMware Workstation 6

running on Windows XP (which resides on my Boot Camp

partition) and VMware Fusion. My desire is to be able

to access the same VM regardless of which operating

system I boot (Mac OS or Windows XP). I can navigate

using Fusion to the .vmx file for my virtual machine

(which resides under Windows XP) but when I try to

run the VM, Fusion states "A serious error occured

when accessing this virtual machine: No such file or

directory".

Should this work??

Thanks in advance.

The challenge is that most likely your Boot Camp partition is NTFS formatted and read only access to our virtual machine will not work. You would need to have a FAT32 formatted Boot Camp partition with read/write permissions in order to use the same virtual machine in both places.

Since VMware Workstation 6.0 and VMware Fusion share the same virtual machine format, this work fine as long as you have correct read/write permissions to the VM in both cases.

Pat

[vmcrash]

You can also try these 2 approaches:

1. Run bootcamp from fusion and from bootcamp start VM 6.

2. If you can't run bootcamp ( like me ) or don't want to do so. Have a small XP VM for fusion. In this VM install VM6 and using shared folders access your VM6 files. This should work, but a lot depends on how robust shared folders are. In any case, it's a good idea to have a base-level XP VM in case you need to recover data from Bootcamp partition.

[BP9906]

how about you change your VMDK file to 2 gig file increments (using vmware-vdiskmanager). Then create a fat32 partition that can read and write it from XP or OSX to put your VMDK files (the 2 gig increment files) on it. You have to do it this way because of the fat32 filesystem limitation.

Then all you'll probably need to do is have 2 different VMX files to handle the path differences and remove the serial/printer ports. Should be fairly easy to do and I can help you if you need me to.