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haralds

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jan 3, 2014
3,003
1,266
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.
 
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