Mount other drive as 2nd drive in VM?

[BP9906]

Has anyone had any luck in being able to mount another drive (say a firewire partition thats fat32) as a disk to their VM?

I know Bootcamp unmounts the drive, then the VMDK somehow routes to the Bootcamp partition. I wonder if we can somehow accomplish the same thing for another fat32 partition that I have on my firewire drive.

I know I can use Shared Folders to sort of accomplish this (share the folder and map a drive to
comp\.fusion\sharedfolder or whatever) but I'd like it to show up as a drive automatically.

I should be able to mimic the BC ability to some extent, and perhaps VMware can add this as a feature request to make it part of the GUI for adding a hard disk to the VM.

Anyway, I'll take any work around via terminal or editing VMX file if possible.

[admin]

Search the forums for "vmware-rawdiskCreator", though I don't think people have reported success with external drives.

[BP9906]

So thats what that executable is... thanks!

Also, any advantages/disadvantages using the different adaptor types:

is the virtual disk type. It must be one of "ide",

"buslogic", or "lsilogic".

I'm guessing that lsilogic is the speediest. What does bootcamp partition vm use? Looks like most people default to IDE which makes sense, but I know SCSI adaptor type is faster for VMware.

Thanks for clarifying.

[BP9906]

Also, I created the VMDK using IDE for a Fat32 partition on my Firewire drive and it worked without issue. I added it to my VM package (.vmwarevm) and added the drive to the VM. I tested the drive with creating, modifying, and reading files (txt, doc, and docx). It worked fine. I only use that drive for file purposes so not sure if execute works.

I booted to bootcamp to see if the drive still shows accurately and it does. Only flaw is that partition doesnt auto remount in OSX when I shutdown the VM.

Thought I'd report on my success.

Still like to know the different adaptor type purposes.

Thanks.

[admin]

My understanding is the adapter type needs to match the underlying hardware so we know how to send commands to it. The failure to auto-remount the drive is a known problem and happens with Boot Camp virtual machines too; I believe a workaround is to use Disk Utility to remount.

Thanks for the success report!

[BP9906]

Yep you're right. Tried to create a VMDK for the same partition using LSIlogic and it failed with an error. Change the argument to IDE and it succeeds.

I know how to remount the drive, just curious if the auto remount is a known issue (which you said it is, so I'm sure its in the roadmap).

Thank you!

FYI - I'm eventually going to try Bootcamp VM and use that VMDK from my firewire partition, so that it will mimic my Vista BC installation exactly.

Then I can basically have access to the same files and fake out my wife w/ the VM.