boot camp with 2 external drives

[Andreas76]

Hi,

I am running the latest Player-Version 12.0.0 (16880131) but I also had this issue on previous releases.

I am running my Mac on an external ssd drive and have my bootcamp on a separated second external ssd drive.

I can natively boot into bootcamp without problems but I am not able to boot this partition in VMware Fusion.

The first error is always that Boot Camp.vmdk could not be found but I can choose it from the file list in the vmwarevm container.

After this I get the final error, that a blocking of resource has been avoided.

Thanks for any help in advance

Andreas

[svoida]

I'm pretty sure that this is the problem that I'm running into, as well.

I have an external SSD (Sandisk Extreme Pro) that I have formatted with three partitions:

200MB EFI partition

750Gb NTFS partition (Windows 10 install)

250Gb APFS partition (macOS scratch disk)

I can boot into the Windows 10 install fine via BootCamp. Fusion (12.1) successfully finds the BootCamp install, offers to set up a VM pointing to it (with reasonable looking values in the associated .vmdk file -- the EFI and NTFS partitions correctly detected and included as FLAT disk segments), but I get a message during VM creation that "Bootcamp volume preprocessing failed" and the VM will not boot. When I try, I get a message indicating that Fusion "cannot open the disk...or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Module 'disk' power on failed."

It's probably a wicked edge case, so I'm not sure that there's much to be done. But I did want to throw in my experience in case it's helpful in tracking down why this particular configuration doesn't work. (It's basically the same config as running off of a partitioned internal disk, just...not internal.)

[svoida]

I also tried simplifying the partition layout of the external drive, just to see if it's an issue with the complexity of a split NTFS/APFS volume, and still no dice. Even with only the EFI partition and a full-sized (bootable) NTFS partition filling the rest of the SSD, Fusion will neither correctly create nor boot to the externally-stored partition.

Would love to see a fix (or to get some advice about how best to tweak the .vmdk file or virtual machine settings) to get this working!

[svoida]

Here are the contents of the .vmdk file that Fusion generates, just in case anybody has ideas....

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
encoding="UTF-8"
CID=fffffffe
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="partitionedDevice"

# Extent description
RW 34 FLAT "Boot Camp-pt.vmdk" 0
RDONLY 30 FLAT "/dev/disk3" 34 partitionUUID @DiSk:diskModel=Extreme|20Pro|2055AF,diskSize=1000171323904,diskVendor=SanDisk
RW 409600 FLAT "/dev/disk3s1" 0 partitionUUID @partition:diskModel=Extreme|20Pro|2055AF,diskSize=1000171323904,diskVendor=SanDisk,partSize=209715200,partOffset=32768,partMediaUUID=21F8D1F1-8C9E-449A-9DF0-C46244A8FEBB,partVolumeUUID=0E239BC6-F960-3107-89CF-1C97F78BB46B
RW 960 ZERO
RW 1464774351 FLAT "/dev/disk3s2" 0 partitionUUID @partition:diskModel=Extreme|20Pro|2055AF,diskSize=1000171323904,diskVendor=SanDisk,partSize=749964467712,partOffset=210239488,partMediaUUID=C4B31D70-3497-4A6C-BCB3-5B277AC66264,partVolumeUUID=0E1655D4-5021-4721-AA31-94D85D93A1FA
RW 1329 ZERO
RW 488273280 ZERO
RW 33 FLAT "Boot Camp-pt.vmdk" 34

# The Disk Data Base
#DDB

ddb.adapterType = "ide"
ddb.geometry.biosCylinders = "1024"
ddb.geometry.biosHeads = "255"
ddb.geometry.biosSectors = "63"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "16383"
ddb.geometry.heads = "16"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.longContentID = "c2e3c0cba3f4adb777221d92fffffffe"
ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 95 d3 d4 2e 20-5a 12 2f 0b 6a 16 eb b4"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "14"

[MichaelRenaud]

I have the same issue, did you find a solution?