Upgrading to larger Hard Drive w/VMWare

[obeechi]

I recently, unplugged my maxtor one touch's usb, with the volumes (partitions) unmounted, then reconnected with firewire, and two volumes will not mount, diskwarrior couldn't rebuild it (though it gave me the chance to copy recovered files to another drive), I zeroed out a volume, tried diskwarrior again, it couldn't do anything, though it tried all night.

On the web, I found a post where someone using Linux had a problem with a maxtor where they felt it was a partition map corruption, and that a faulty usb/ide was responsible. So for now, I'm a little afraid of USB. Invalid node is what Disk Utility reported back. Not sure if Micromat TechTool can succeed where Diskwarrior couldn't. One thing I should have paid more attention to is that at one point a volume on this external drive appeared in the Finder as if it where an internal hard drive.

As far as VMware, not sure if you're running boot camp or a pure vm. If boot camp, winclone can back up your windows partition. If pure vm, superduper can make a copy to HFS+ no problem.

If you're going to partition a drive to run hfs+ and ntfs natively, then use Mac's Disk Utility to partition your drive using GUID as the partition scheme. The volume to be ntfs should be set to dos or fat while the othe drives should be Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I could do this with Tiger no problem -- but at an Apple store (with Leopard) just now, I could only see Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as an option. Later you use windows to switch the fat to ntfs.

Personally, I prefer pure vm's and virtual disks, because then I don't have to worry about windows 4 primary drive limits (the guid option creates an unseen primary drive), but then you might need to open up the vm with vmx extras, and edit the setting from TRUE to FALSE to disassociate a drive (this can be done in Fusion's settings by "minus-ing" the drive) (this applies for someone who might have a laptop with a vm and they want a virtual disk on an external drive -- the benefit is that you can access the drive with mac and your vm simultaneously with no toggling needed -- but the other day someone told that in the past on other vm products there were bug reports of when a vm and its virtual disks are in different locations -- I have four vmdk's, 2 internal, 2 external, and only the external would be disassociated (so I can boot when not attached to to the external drive)), and to reconnect you change FALSE to TRUE (easier to do this with VMX Extras than Fusion's own settings --- which requires browsing, and I'm not clear if it will reconnect correctly (whether it will be joined to a different scsi drive, or the same one). I'm told you can use Firewire to access these virtual disks, though I recall having some problem during vmdk creation, which didn't raise its head while accessing the drive via USB. That's something I need to look at again.