Windows File on A Mac System : File System Compatibility Issue : Please Help :)

Hello,

This is my predicament:

1. I have a Seagate external hard drive, which is not mac, compatible, with a VMWare application.

2. My laptop is a Mac Book Pro.

3. I wish to run the Windows VMWare application, from the external hard drive, using VMWare Fusion for Mac.

4. I now realize the Mac will not read the external hard drive because it is only Windows compatible, since the file system is NTFS and not FAT32 as is required for a Mac.

5. So my question is, or rather the solution that I am proposing is as follows and I would like your expert opinion as to whether this would work:

Buy a Mac Compatible external hard drive and then copy the VMWare file from the Windows-compatible hard drive and then use VMWare Fusion for the Mac to launch the VMWare application.

WOULD THIS WORK ?

My only concern is however, the vmware application which would be copied from the windows-compatiable hard drive, may still not work on the Mac because the file system of the VMWare application file was originally written in windows and hence maybe NTFS or something ?

If anyone could help, I would highly appreciate it.

Best regards

 

You don't need to buy any specific 'mac' marketed hard drives, you can buy any, you will need to use 'disk utility' on mac to format it appropiately, usually MAC OS Journalled its called I think.

You might have a few issues, mainly because mac drives dont like to be read on windows. The FAT32 file system is compatible for both but has a file size limit of 4gb I think. Which might affect your application file.

You ideally need a new hard drive which you will format to mac os journalled when you get it. This will lift the file size limit. You then can copy it across I think. Usually the VMware file is just one big file I am pretty sure isn't it?

Just a cheap external hard drive will be fine tbh. Maybe a cheap small SSD if you need the performance.

 

The easiest solution would be to copy the file from the external hard drive to your Mac. OS X can read from an NTFS disk but cannot write to it. Boot into Windows and format the external hard drive with the exFAT file system, using a cluster size of 1024 or less (anything higher causes corruption in OS X). Go back to OS X, and copy the file to the external hard drive. Now you should be able to read and write from it without issue. If for whatever reason that does not work, you may have to bite the bullet and purchase an NTFS driver for OS X. The two best ones are Paragon and Tuxera. I prefer the latter because it reads/writes a bit faster and the license is lifetime. Though cheaper up front, Paragon makes you pay for each new revision (8, 9, 10, etc).

 

Thanks for your quick responses guys...

1. My issue is not buying another drive - that is fine, I'll buy another 1TB Mac compatible drive (don't want to reformat current one as I'll have problems of moving it to somewhere, whilst I reformat it in Mac using the disk utility program you mention...the VMWare application file is over 500GB!

2. My concern is, if I but a Mac hdd, and copy the VMWare application file, which was produced in an Windows environment, would VMWare Fusion then be able to read this VMWare application file, which was written in an Windows environment.....i.e what if the vmware file is not compatiable with vmware Fusion ? Does Fusion not only read fusion-type files...if that even makes sense ?

Many thanks once again to you both - cheers

 

you guys are making this all too difficult. get another external hard drive format it as exFAT not FAT32, and then you have no 4GB limits etc, it works on both platforms. ( win XP, vista, 7, and 8 - OSX 10.5 + ) and be done with it. one drive and fully cross platform.

OP there is no such thing as a " Mac " drive. they are all standard western digital, Seagate, Hitachi etc drives just formatted with a different file system.

my honest opinion here would be to copy it to your system and try it. I have a number of applications that will not work in fusion.

 

Cheers, mate, I suppose there's only one way of finding out...trying it out and hoping for the best.

 

Which is exactly what I was suggesting, but trying to save the OP some money by not needing to purchase another hard drive.

Again, though, when creating an exFAT partition, do what I said in my first post and format the drive in Windows, not OS X.

 

but what do you think, in your opinion that is, will the vmware file created in an windows environment work on the VMWare Fusion for Mac ? That is the real problem - not a new hdd or format of it as that is easily solved with a new hdd I'll buy

 

Have you contacted VMWare with this question? They would be the ones who could best answer.

 

That;s a good idea, didn't think of that- thanks

 

I actually do this all the time with my Mac. I don't like to run my VMs from an external drive although USB 3.0 does make this a fairly reasonable proposition. The problem from my experience is that there is still some overhead involved in reading/writing files through USB of any speed so there is some "conversion" that occurs at a high rate of speed during the process. This translates to a user experience where a process that is managing a hundred tiny files feels very slow to run but a process that manages one or two big files seems almost as fast as having it on your hard drive.

Anyway, I bought a bundle that included two drivers... one for my Mac OS that writes to NTFS and one for Windows that allows it to write to the HFS+ partition. The company was Paragon Technologies Gmbh. I'm not endorsing them or anything, but I bought the drivers and my Mac sees all my NTFS items without issue and can write to them as you would expect. This means that my bootcamp partition works fine as well as all my external drives. The bundle I bought also has a Windows driver so my bootcamp partition mounts my Mac partition as the D drive when I boot into Windows.

I don't usually run my VMs from my external drive but I do run Steam games from within Windows on my external drive and it is fast enough. I don't really notice it being much different than having them installed on any other 5400 RPM drive once the thing launches the game.