VMware Fusion - Journaled External HDD using MacDrive or NTFS?

I'm not really answering your question (sorry), but you can create a virtual hard drive from within VMware's interface. The file for the virtual hard drive can reside anywhere, including your external drive. It will start out small and grow up to the max size you specify when you create it. On the Windows side, it looks like a regular hard drive. In my case, my second drive mounts as the "E:" drive.

I find this useful, because the virtual drive does not take up my whole external drive. And the external drive can be formatted for Mac (HFS+) while Windows XP thinks the second drive is formatted for NTFS. In my case, the file for the virtual drive resides on an external drive that I uses for other Mac things.

Now, if you want to share data from both the Mac and Windows sides, instead of using a virtual hard drive (or a real hard drive), you can use WMware's Shared Folders feature to map a share point on the Mac side as a network drive on the Windows side. In my case, I have a folder in my Mac OS X user Documents folder mapped to drive Z: in Windows. Since it's not really going over a network, it is fast.

So if I use this drive in Windows, the files are immediately available in Mac OS X. If you access that folder in Mac OS X, the changes are immediately available in Windows. I can probably go the other way and connect from the Mac side to a share point on the Windows side, but I haven't figured that out yet.

All things being equal, you'll probably want to use the filesystem that is native to whatever platform you intend to use most with it. If you intend to use XP most of the time, NTFS is a decent choice, otherwise, use Mac's HFS+ Journaled. There are a few other considerations: you can't mark executable files stored on NTFS -- but that's only a concern if you want to install apps and utilities on there. Journaling is perhaps not so important on video data as it is the editing project file itself. Video data you tend to not alter during NLE, just make temporary renders of frames.

You might also consider Premiere on the Mac it that's all you're doing. Going that route will provide you both with better performance (no Windows memory fragmentation), and you don't have to deal with the added complexity of BootCamp, or reduced performance of a virtual machine.

I would try what I mentioned in the second half of the post.

Format that external HHD for Mac and mount it normally for Mac. Using VMware's Share Folders feature (set up in Settings for the virtual machine), make the entire external HHD a "shared folder." Then, in Windows, map that shared folder (the whole external HHD) as a network drive. It's not really going over a network, so speed is not an issue.

Whether you access it from the Windows side or Mac side, it's the same place. And you don't need special software, other than VMware's existing features.

Are these drives USB or FireWire?

I ask, because looking at the virtual machine settings, I don't see any options for using FireWire devices. I do support for seeing USB 2.0 devices.

You can make it work, using the Shared Folder feature of VMware Fusion. And you don't even need that MacDrive thing. To me, it seems like a better solution.

With the virtual machine not running, click the Settings button. In the Settings window, click the plus sign at the bottom of the left sidebar. Select +Add Shared Folder...+

Check Enabled and give it a Name (like the name of the external drive in this case).

For path, select Choose... Navigate to select your entire external drive as your Shared Folder.

Start up Windows. Open My Computer, and use +Map Network Drive+ under the Tools menu. That Shared Folder you defined earlier should be accessible for mapping. Seems like this would be the same as connecting it as a regular hard drive. There should not be a speed issue, because it's not really going over a network.

I suggested this already in my previous replies, but since you did not say it won't work for your purposes, I thought I'd try one more time. You are NOT creating a virtual hard drive disk image. Your data is going directly to your real hard drive, just getting there a bit differently. From the Mac side, it's just a plain old FireWire drive connected directly.

When I do +Map Network Drive+ and click on Browse, the Browse for Folder window pops up. In that window, I see +My Network Places+. Under that is +Entire Network+. Clicking the plus sign gives me (among other things) +VMware Shared Folders+. Clicking the plus signs down through a few levels shows me the Shared Folders I have defined.

For this to work, you must have installed VMware Tools on the Windows side. If you did not, you get a reminder along the bottom of the Windows screen, so I assume you have.

Hi guys,

I'm pretty much in the same situation than the topic starter.

I've a NTFS bootcamp partition on my Mini, running XPsp2.

I've installed MacDrive7 on the Win-side, and ParagonNTFS on the OSX-side, so basically I can access every drive from every OS.

Plus, I've an external mac-formatted drive connected via USB.

Now, while everything goes smooth and cool with native bootcamping, I just fail to re-activate MacDrive in Fusion. Program stay activated re-entering in Bootcamp though (thanks to VMWare Tools?).

Any suggestion?

My company purchased me a FireWire Seagate FreeAgent Pro 1TB external drive. I partitioned the external drive into a 500GB HFS+ and 500GB NTFS. I was using it solely when I was booting up into Bootcamp directly, but recently I finally got my licensed copy of VMWare Fusion 1.2.

I was shocked that the disk did not appear when I booted up into Windows. With hours of looking I did not like the idea of setting up a Shared Folder. I tried using the shared folder like this thread stated and since I was using a NTFS partition it was read only when I tried to write to it inside windows. I was not interested in installing a 3rd party tool that would provide NTFS support to OS X.

I wanted to use the drive as an actual drive inside VMWare.

I stumbled across on how you can! I wish VMWare would add this to their settings UI, but I guess this will do for now.

Here is the solution that I found on VMWare's community forum that gives a step by step instructions on using VMWare's rawdiskCreator command line tool.
*Link to thread:* [http://communities.vmware.com/message/951830#951830]

Afterwards my external firewire SeagatePC partition showed up in My Computer and Seagate's Autobackup worked with no problems.
!http://communities.vmware.com/servlet/JiveServlet/downloadImage/2-951830-2671/E xternalDriveMounted.jpg!