Bootcamp mounts all partitions on same disk

[pompiedom]

Fusion: 3.1.0 (254806)

Mac: MBP 5.1

I have two harddisks in my mbp:

hd1: 1 partition hfs+ osx on it

hd2: 2 (MBR) partitions:

- 1 ntfs with bootcamp windows 7

- 2 ntfs data

Now if I boot bootcamp from fusion it mounts both the partitions on hd2 while I want partition 2 mounted in osx.

I couldn't find documentation or topics on this matter so, is this possible?

[pompiedom]

Well seems I got it work, but its not an answer more like a workaround:

First time I made 2 partitions with the MBR option in the diskutility, this installs fine but has the problem that when you mount the bootcamp partition in fusion it mounts both/all partitions on the same disk.

Second time (the working time) I formatted the disk first 1 partition HFS+ and then made the windows partition with the bootcamp assistent. Now it mounts nicely only the bootcamp partition.

[mudaltsov]

Looks like you already worked around the issue by re-partitioning the disk, but I'd like to post the instructions for anyone else who runs into the same issue.

By default, Fusion will use all available NTFS or FAT32 partitions on the same disk for Boot Camp VMs because in most cases it's what users want - usually if you have a separate data partition, you want to access it in Windows.

If you want to leave some partitions mounted on the Mac, you'll have to create a custom VMDK file that only references some of the partitions (in your case only the first partition with the OS, but not the data partition).

To do this, run Terminal and use the following commands:

1. Go to the VMware Fusion support directory, which contains the vmware-rawdiskCreator utility for creating VMDK files based on physical disks.

cd "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion"

2. Print the list of partitions on the disk.

./vmware-rawdiskCreator print /dev/disk#

You'll need to substitute disk# with the appropriate disk identifier such as disk0 or disk1, which you can get from the Info panel in Disk Utility. The output should look something like this: (this is for a GPT-partitioned disk with one HFS+ and one NTFS partition)

Nr      Start       Size Type Id Sytem                   
-- ---------- ---------- ---- -- ------------------------
 1          1     409639 BIOS EE Unknown
 2     409640  191208168 BIOS AF HFS+
 3  191879952   33434549 BIOS  7 HPFS/NTFS

3. Pick one or more partition numbers that you want the VM to access, and create a virtual disk referencing them.

./vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk# partNums /path/to/vmdk ide

You'll need to substitute partNums with the partition numbers, for example 3 or 1,2

Also, substitute /path/to/vmdk with the path of the Boot Camp VMDK file, without the .vmdk extension.

Note: you'll need to delete the existing Boot Camp.vmdk and Boot Camp-pt.vmdk files before running the command, otherwise it won't overwrite them. Once the files are replaced, you should be able to run the Boot Camp VM with only the partitions you specified.

If you need help locating any of the files, take a look at