change virtual hard disk type on vmware fusion

January 24, 2010

in mac

This is another one of those things I discovered just through some trial and error. VMWare Fusion has two different virtual hard disk types — SCSI (the default) and IDE. I was messing around with a custom compiled kernel that was having issues working with a SCSI disk and I wanted to try an IDE disk, but I didn’t want to have to recreate the entire virtual machine from scratch. Though the option to change the disk type is greyed out in the settings panel, I went and hacked the config files directly. To change from SCSI to IDE, this is what to do: Say your virtual machine is named “mymachine”, and the disk is named “mydisk”. Edit mymachine.vmx — you’ll see lines for your disk like these:

scsi0:0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:0.fileName = "mydisk.vmdk"

Change those to this:

ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.fileName = "mydisk.vmdk"

Then, in the config file for your virtual disk, “mydisk.vmdk”, you’ll see a line like this:

ddb.adapterType = "scsi"

change it to this:

ddb.adapterType = "ide"

then start up your VM… whammy, you’ve switched from a SCSI to an IDE drive. (you can obviously do the same process in reverse if need be).

Cheers!

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: