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Working with VMware Fusion and Boot Camp partitions (1014515)

Purpose

This article identifies options for using VMware Fusion with an already-installed Boot Camp partition.

For more information about Boot Camp, see http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp .

Note: The preceding link was available as of April 29, 2010. If you find the link to be broken, provide feedback on the article and a VMware employee will update the article as necessary.

Resolution

VMware Fusion has two ways of working with an already-installed Boot Camp partition:

Note: When launching a Boot Camp partition directly, these Fusion features are unavailable:

  • Suspend and Resume
  • Mirrored Folders
  • Snapshots and AutoProtect
  • Virtual disk backup

Additional Information

Those features are unavailable because they would conflict with using Boot Camp natively, or because they require a virtual disk.

Suspend and resume save the contents of the RAM to disk; this works similarly to Windows Hibernate feature but is implemented differently and so the two are not inter-compatible.

Mirrored folders redirect the Windows directories to the Mac directories; the Mac directories are not available in Boot Camp.

Snapshots capture the contents of the RAM and create a supplementary virtual disk; AutoProtect is a feature derived from the multiple snapshot feature, which allows you to have more than one snapshot at a time. Snapshots and AutoProtect rely on a virtual parent disk, whereas Boot Camp uses a physical disk. As such, it is impossible to take a snapshot or use AutoProtect with a Boot Camp partition.

Tags

use-bootcamp-partition

Update History

08/23/2012 - Added Fusion 5.x to Products

Request a Product Feature

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