A few VMWare 2 + Parallels 4 questions...

[2002cbr600f4i]

Ok, startign to dig into these two tools (latest versions of both..)

I have Windows 7 set up in a boot camp on a 2nd drive. I also have a 3rd + 4th drive which I use for Windows to put all my games and such on.

Now then, I was able to get Parallels to do the Boot Camp import thing, but it would only let me add the Boot camp boot disk, not the other two...

Second, when you do this stuff with a boot camp install, does modifying the Windows inside of Parallels (like installing software) actually modify the Boot Camp disk, or does Parallels (or VMWare) make a copy of the Boot Camp disk into a virtual drive image inside of the OSX drive?

Sorry if these are newb questions, this is the first time I've had a boot camp partition and used these tools before...

 

[Tomorrow]

I have Windows 7 set up in a boot camp on a 2nd drive. I also have a 3rd + 4th drive which I use for Windows to put all my games and such on.

Now then, I was able to get Parallels to do the Boot Camp import thing, but it would only let me add the Boot camp boot disk, not the other two...

Are the 3rd and 4th disks external? I'm not sure you can boot from those, if that's the case then Boot Camp won't help.

Second, when you do this stuff with a boot camp install, does modifying the Windows inside of Parallels (like installing software) actually modify the Boot Camp disk, or does Parallels (or VMWare) make a copy of the Boot Camp disk into a virtual drive image inside of the OSX drive?

It depends:

If you installed Windows under Boot Camp, then installed Parallels/Fusion, and pointed your virtualization application to your Boot Camp installation, then modifying the Windows inside Parallels/Fusion is modifying the Boot Camp installation of Windows, since that's the installation you're running.

If you installed Windows under Parallels/Fusion and are running that installation, then your Boot Camp installation is not affected. Personally, I wouldn't recommend this setup; I think it's easier to have one installation of Windows and maintain that one alone.

 

[2002cbr600f4i]

Are the 3rd and 4th disks external? I'm not sure you can boot from those, if that's the case then Boot Camp won't help.



It depends:

If you installed Windows under Boot Camp, then installed Parallels/Fusion, and pointed your virtualization application to your Boot Camp installation, then modifying the Windows inside Parallels/Fusion is modifying the Boot Camp installation of Windows, since that's the installation you're running.

If you installed Windows under Parallels/Fusion and are running that installation, then your Boot Camp installation is not affected. Personally, I wouldn't recommend this setup; I think it's easier to have one installation of Windows and maintain that one alone.

3rd + 4th drives are internals on the Mac Pro. They're 300GB Seagate drives formated NTFS (pretty much just pulled them from my old Windows box and dropped them in..)

As far as the windows installs, I installed using Boot camp, and then installed Parallels and VMWare and told them to use the BC drive. Thing is, they both only want to let me access the 150GB Raptor drive that I installed Windows to under BC, not the 2 additional seagate data drives. Since I install all my games and such onto the seagates, unless I can get VMWare + Parallels to see those and let me access them, any chance of even casual gaming through those tools is shot (and that was really the only reason I bought either of them... to minimize how much I'd have to go to full Windows for gaming...)

 

[Tomorrow]

If the drives have a Windows installation that was installed with the drives in another computer, they won't work in your Mac. The drivers, configuration, etc. are all different now. Plus, it sounds like since BC wasn't involved in the installation of those two drives, it doesn't recognize them as bootable partitions.

You can still game with them, if you enter BC and install Windows on one or both of those drives; or boot into your working Windows partition and format those two drives for use under Windows. They should be totally usable for gaming.

 

[2002cbr600f4i]

If the drives have a Windows installation that was installed with the drives in another computer, they won't work in your Mac. The drivers, configuration, etc. are all different now. Plus, it sounds like since BC wasn't involved in the installation of those two drives, it doesn't recognize them as bootable partitions.

You can still game with them, if you enter BC and install Windows on one or both of those drives; or boot into your working Windows partition and format those two drives for use under Windows. They should be totally usable for gaming.

You're not following me...

Drives 3+4 are purely DATA drives... They don't have (nor do they need) Windows INSTALLED onto them. They're just extra drives so I have more room to install games and such onto. Windows is installed onto the 2nd drive in my system, which is my Boot camp Windows BOOT drive. IT has Windows on it.

I pulled them out of the old machine, put them into this one. No I didn't format them, but I've been reinstalling all my games and such onto drive 3 while running windows under bootcamp. It sees those 2 drives just fine...

I don't understand why Parallels and VMWare won't though... I see the drive icons on the OSX desktop, I can browse them, etc.

What does the drives being "bootable" have to do with being USEABLE? They're DATA drives!

 

[r.j.s]

I don't understand why Parallels and VMWare won't though... I see the drive icons on the OSX desktop, I can browse them, etc.

You need to eject them from OS X and mount them in Fusion/Parallels ...

 

[Guiyon]

VMWare does not have the capability to access raw SATA/IDE disks from its GUI. It does, however, include a command line utility for making a raw-disk backed VMDK. The utility is called "vmware-rawdiskCreator" and it resides in "/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion". To get started, open up the Terminal and type:

cd "/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion"

There is an inherent risk in doing this.
If you are unsure or something looks off, STOP! It may be wise to try this out using a disk (or partition) that you don't care about first. Do NOT do this with external drives, the disk numbers tend to change on those and you could end up mucking around with the wrong disk inadvertently

Now type

mount

and hit enter. This will spit out a list of mounted drives; look for a drive labeled "/Volumes/<NAME>" where "<NAME>" is the name of the drive you want to use. Once you find the drive you want, look at the start of the line for a "/dev/disk?s?" path, where the two '?' characters are numbers. You are interested in the first part of this string ("/dev/disk?"). From now on I am simply going to refer to that string as DISK_PATH. Just replace any occurrences of DISK_PATH with the string you just found.

Now type

./vmware-rawdiskCreator print DISK_PATH

This will print the partition table as VMWare will see it. Since your partition will be formatted as NTFS, look for the largest HPFS/NTFS partition and write down the number under the "Nr" field, I will refer to this as PART_NUM.

Finally, type

./vmware-rawdiskCreator create DISK_PATH PART_NUM /path/to/the/vmdk/file/to/create.vmdk ide

This will create a VMWare VMDK file at "/path/to/the/vmdk/file/to/create.vmdk" which you can then add to your VM as an additional HD.