Use a second disk image with VMWare?

Sad Professor · 08-04-2009 3:32pm #1

Okay, I use my Bootcamp partition with VMWare. But I've several gigs of data on an external drive that I need to use within Windows but since the data is HFS+ it won't work properly in Windows. It needs to be in FAT32 but I don't have enough space on the Bootcamp drive and I don't want to reformat/partition my external drive. So was I thinking I could just create a FAT32 disk image, move all the data on to it and use it with VMWare. I assume this is possible since VMWare runs off a disk image by default.

Anyone know how I do this? Am I making any sense?

WizZard · 08-04-2009 3:37pm

You could connect it to your mac and share it as a host shared folder to your Fusion image?

Sad Professor · 08-04-2009 3:43pm

WizZard wrote: »

You could connect it to your mac and share it as a host shared folder to your Fusion image?

Yeah I know but I need to use the data with a Windows program. It can recognise that it's in HFS+ and won't work properly. So it needs to be in FAT32.

babypink · 08-04-2009 4:04pm

use disk utility to create a new disk image -- select MS-DOS(FAT) as the format and copy your data into the image.

once done --- unmount the dmg and convert it, in Disk Utility, to DVD/CD Master.

this will yield a .cdr image which VMWare should mount no problem.

---there is one caveat here ---- Disk Utility will only create FAT16 and not FAT32 unfortunately. Though unless you're talking about very large individual files -- it should make little difference.

P.S. --- you're still booting VMWare off your bootcamp partition here. It should treat the second image as another drive.

Sad Professor · 08-04-2009 4:44pm

Is there not a limit on how big a cdr image can be?

WizZard · 08-04-2009 4:55pm

Sad Professor wrote: »

Yeah I know but I need to use the data with a Windows program. It can recognise that it's in HFS+ and won't work properly. So it needs to be in FAT32.

Are you talking about raw data? IIRC VMware Fusion mounts Shared Host Folders as a "networked drive" so it would be presented to Windows via SMB (most likely), not as an attached block device. Therefore there would be no issues accessing files.
As long as OS X can see the drive you can present it to VMware.
Don't allow USB passthrough - as that won't work, use Shared Folders

If you need to access the device in a raw form, then that's a different matter.

Can I clarify a couple of things:

1. You are talking about VMware Fusion
2. You are booting your Bootcamp drive in VMware Fusion (i.e. within Mac OSX)

ethernet · 08-04-2009 5:06pm

Hmmm, read your post a few times. Maybe I'm missing something but can you just connect the external drive and allow it to "pass through" to the guest OS using the little icon in the botton right? I do this all the time with memory keys and external hard drives. The only thing is OS X can't access the drive until you suspend/power off the VM or stop the guest using it.

Sad Professor · 08-04-2009 6:04pm

Ah, I figured it out. I'm so stupid! You were right about shared folders, WizZard.

See, a while ago I was having problems using shared folders so I was accessing the data via a network share instead. I figured it was the same thing and forgot all about it. However, the windows program is a batch file and it kept giving me errors which I stupidly assumed was because of the file-system.

But actually it's because CMD.exe doesn't support network paths. Everything works fine with shared folders because VMware mounts it as a drive and points to it on the mac or whatever. It works now!

Thanks for the help, guys.

Use a second disk image with VMWare?

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