Insufficient space for importing TM backup with migration assistant

That TM FAQ really doesn't help. There are plenty of ways to resize the VM Ware Fusion partition in Windows when you want to import your old PC and it is larger than 40 GB, is there no way to accomplish this run OS X inside Fusion?

Surely I am not the first person that decided to update to a newer OS X like ML but wanted to start with a brand new clean install but also have access to my former OS X user account and thought migrating it to run within Fusion would be a good idea now that it can finally virtualize OS X. There has to be a way to import my old Snow Leopard user account into my VM so that I can see it side by side with a dual monitor set up.

This is not Windows question. I am running Mountain Lion inside of a virtual machine using Mountain Lion. This is on a Mac Pro also running Mountain Lion as the real OS. I just need to figure out a way to import my old Time Machine backup of Snow Leopard into the virtual Mountain Lion install without getting insuffivient storage message. Need to figure out how to resize that 40GB partition to a larger size of at least 200GB.

I just solved the problem! And this is actually a pretty big deal because experts at the VM Ware Fusion website and many other forums told me it was impossible.

So here is the guide to running Mountain Lion in VM Ware Fusion or Parallels with a partition larger than 40GB and allows you to import an old user account from Tiger, Snow Leopard, Lion, etc..

1) Make sure to shut down Mountain Lion in VM

2) Under VM settings expand hard drive to whatever size you like

3) You will need either a disk image or an actual DVD of mountain lion, mount that in your VM and choose it as start up. After rebooting open disk utility and partition Mac HD. Instead of only showing the 40GB limit it shold now show the size you created from step 2. Close disk utility and install Mountain Lion as normal. Reboot and unmount disk image.

4) You now have a virtual Mountain Lion with whatever hard disk size you chose.

5) Open migration assistant and do your time machine back up as normal from previous systems.

The reason you might want to do this are many. In my case I wanted to have my old Snow Leopard user account open and running on my second monitor since I just did a fresh install on my Mac Pro. It is easy to import audio, photos, videos but there was a lot of other things I want to take my time bringinging over. There are also many cases where I needed to open up an app and view settings. Now I have my old machine essentially running at the same time as my new install side by side which is fantastic.

I sure will. I saw while researching an answer that there were many people trying to do this and just gave up. I didn't see how to create a new tip though at your link. Will look again. I am just glad I proved the VM Ware Fusion experts wrong. It was so easy that I almost missed it and far easier to do than on a Windows VM but no surprise there.