Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

haralds

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Jan 3, 2014
2,994
1,259
Silicon Valley, CA
I had some disk issues and ended up replacing my BootCamp installation by backing it up with Winclone, installing a new disk and restoring. I just used Disk Utility to create a GUID exFAT disk making sure I had a hybrid MBR, since my Mac Pro 5,1 runs best with BIOS boot.
After I got Windows 10 running swimmingly I tried to import the new BootCamp disk into a VMware VM. It failed immediately.
After mucking around creating a vmd file with the command line tool etc. nothing worked. I finally followed the KB and started over. To be sure I went back to set up and old Lion install and created the BootCamp disk and configuration that way.
Restored, got Windows going, VMware Fusion still got stuck.
I finally had the idea to install a previous version under High Sierra - I always have at least three generations on OS on my Mac Pro - lots of disk space. It worked like a charm.
I copied that back to my Catalina disk and everything worked fine with Fusion v11.5.3. The VMDK has to be edited based on a KB, if you want to run with SIP enabled.
BTW, since macOS mounts secondary (not root) disks in an arbitrary order, I created a script that uses a VMDK template which is edited based on the current /dev/disk assignments on login. VMware Fusion should handle this more elegantly for real disks not on the root disk.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.