Venu Anuganti Blog

Since few days am experimenting with few tools to clone my existing Mac disk to another of my USB backup drive (WD 250GB Passport) so that I can re-partition the existing primary disk to have a room for Bootcamp. This is needed because the OS am running is the image from Yahoo! which has lot of tools thats hard to reinstall back. So having a complete image makes the life much easier.

I found two nice tools which can actually clone the disk and moreover they are free. SuperDuper! Carbon Copy Cloner I could not able to install SuperDuper! for some reason as the downloaded .dmg file is not mountable on 10.4.10, contacted the product support team, and a got a message that the downloaded file is corrupt. I did tried this with all other 3 browsers and from 4 different locations, nothing seemed to be working for me. On the other hand I was able to install Carbon Copy Cloner without any problems and did a complete clone of the existing disk to USB disk using couple of clicks and it just took few hours to complete (~50GB). To test the backup disk how it really works, I rebooted the Macbook with this USB drive and the system seemed to be up and running from USB disk and behaves exactly as the primary hard drive except that it took little longer to boot. Carbon Copy Cloner does not support the incremental updates when you wanted to re-clone the disk back where as SuperDuper! does seemed to support this through Smart Update. Now, its time for me to play with the primary hard disk.

As I upgraded to VMWare Fusion RC1 recently based on the comments from Ben G from VMWare as RC1 supports Global keys, experimental Suspend and Revoke, Snapshots and Unity features. The upgraded one is really doing good especially the performance and overall appearance. In case if you have the older build of Fusion, I recommend going ahead with the newer one.

As I wrote earlier, by default the suspend feature is not enabled. So, you have to manually enable it by changing suspend.disabled= “TRUE” to “FALSE” from the file ~/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/Virtual\ Machines/Boot\ Camp*/Boot\ Camp\ partition.vmwarevm/Boot\ Camp\ partition.vmx; which makes it easy to suspend and revoke the OS within the virtual environment. That seemed to work for few days and lately I noticed a strange problem.

Since a day or so, whenever I needed to suspend my guest Vista OS within fusion, it pops up a login dialog to enter the sudo access and then it hangs and nothing that it takes..nor I can type anything in dialog and the fan starts spinning like anything. I can’t get the control back to either of the OS; so only option is to recycle the power and start both the OS back.

As an alternative I tried to disable the suspend feature (suspend.disabled= "TRUE"); then the Vista doesn’t even boot to the OS and it just hangs as blank screen after the initial bios process. Looks like there is some suspend state which fusion uses is causing this; and boots back fine without any problem once I enable the suspend feature.

I thought this was fixed lately by VMWare Fusion and Parallels. But at least with VMWare Fusion, I am still asked to re-activate when I boot from one version to another one. For example, Microsoft office 2007, I must re-activate back when I boot to bootcamp Windows Vista and also, when I reboot back to Virtual Vista using Fusion Bootcamp. So, in other terms, I need to re-activate the product whenever I change the boot process from one to another; which is really annoy.

Also, even Windows Vista ultimate needs re-activation when I change the boot to direct bootcamp Vista from virtual one telling hardware changes are detected; but booting back to Virtual vista does not need a re-activation. But when you reboot back to direct bootcamp version, again it will ask you to re-activate.

This is really messy…I am using MSDN Enterprise License of Vista Ultimate Edition and Office 2007 Enterprise with VMWare Fusion RC1.

As VMWare Fusion RC1 started supporting Global keys, which was handy for me to switch between two desktops using Virtue desktop manager as I keep one desktop for Fusion Vista in full-screen mode and another one for Mac OS X. Switching between them when Fusion started supporting global keys is easy (CTRL + ALT / OPTION + Left or right arrow).

Actually this is well needed feature that I was expecting even in my 10 wishes to run Windows on Mac. But actual problem started when I started using Visual Studio 2005. As Visual Studio is my default working environment for most of the C/C++ projects that currently I develop, the editor becomes unusable as F and CTRL + F combination keys are treated as global keys by Fusion and invokes Mac activities. So, I can not even do a search using shortcut keys nor debug a program(F5, F9, F10..). So, I have to manually turn them off in Fusion (Menu -> Preferences -> Uncheck Enable Mac OS Keyboard shortcuts) inorder to get the visual studio to work. So, currently am back to basic without Global key support in Fusion. I know that Parallels supports this global keys, not sure how it acts if another application within guest OS has the same key combination. I still think Fusion should first give the preference to local guest OS and then pass it on to host OS instead of directly to host.

After reading the comment from Ben on my 10 wishes to improve Windows experience on Mac, I upgraded my VMWare Fusion Beta 3 to Release Candidate 1 (RC 1), build 50460.

After the upgrade the things seemed to be as it was with the old Beta 3 without much difference. So, I thought of reinstalling the VMWare tools; and once I re-installed; whole thing made a big difference. Now it accepts global system keys along with Unity feature. Even though the Unity feature is not working as I expected, but coherence still has the upper hand on this. May be I did not tested the Unity with XP to compare, but Coherence with Vista is much much better.

Most importantly; it now supports the boot camp suspend and restore mechanism, which is very handy to me. I have to enable the suspend feature by changing suspend.disabled= "TRUE" to "FALSE" from the file ~/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/Virtual\ Machines/Boot\ Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0/Boot\ Camp\ partition.vmwarevm/Boot\ Camp\ partition.vmx; and after restarting the Fusion, I can suspend and resume the Boot camp Vista OS within virtual machine.

For the whole day, I noticed three major issues after the upgrade to RC1:

• Randomly Bootcamp Vista hung twice within the Fusion, which made me to restart the guest OS .. not sure what caused this.. but I noticed the OS as if is not accepting any keys and I tried all combinations.. the host Mac OS works fine and global keys works as expected and the macbook fan keeps spinning like anything during that time…so, after closing and restarting the Fusion, the things works back… Need to find why this is happening as its not a good sign .. may be I need to enable the debug options, so that I can send the report to the team.. lets play that over weekend.
• Macbook hung in the middle of the upgrade process of VMWare tools for the first time, and after the restart the things seemed to be OK.
• Fusion freezes after the Vista boots when snapshots are enabled from Boot Camp partition.vmx, so I have to disable the snapshots and stick to suspend and restore for time being.

Looks like there is still some work from the Fusion team before they can go ahead with the actual production release, but its pretty much close to stable state and we have to appreciate the amount of features they started supporting and lately the performance and user experience is much much better and improving for every release.

Most of the developers run virtual guest operating systems as part of day to day development. The host OS could be either Windows, Linux or Mac, and guest could be Windows or Linux. I currently use both Parallels 4128 and VMWare Fusion on my Macbook Pro with Bootcamp Vista partition. Even though Parallels still didn’t work for me (thanks for the comment from Archy from Parallels team, but that hint also didn’t work for me), so I use VMWare Fusion to boot my Vista.

Here is the list of problems that is keep bothering me by both the virtual machines along with the Bootcamp. I wish if they could escalate them in the coming versions.

1. When the Vista did not had a clean shutdown, the subsequent boot leads to Windows Recovery Error Console with different boot options, but BootCamp under dual boot, does not respond to any of the keyboard keys (or in other terms, keyboard is not activated). This makes the recovery console to boot to normal mode and has to wait for 28 secs as one can’t change anything. There is no such problem when running under VM. So, it might be a bootcamp issue.. I use version 1.3, so thats the latest one from Apple. You get into this Recovery Console Boot options menu only when the OS did not had a clean shutdown.
2. When running Vista directly without any VM using Bootcamp, I noticed that when the battery goes down, there is no indicator or pre-alarm to indicate low batter level. I do have the right configuration for battery alerts. Not sure why they are not working. The laptop simply powers off when the battery goes to 0%. Not sure if its a problem with the Bootcamp or Vista.
3. When I have the Vista OS running under VM, when the OS goes to stand-by or sleep mode, the VMWare or Parallels does not recognize this and instead thinks the OS is still running. Only option for me is to exit and start the VM, which makes the OS to boot back from the scratch but not from the stand-by mode. When running under Bootcamp, this works as expected. I think these tools should recognize this and provide a way to recover from stand-by or sleep mode.
4. VMWare Fusion, when the guest OS is running; doesn’t accept or recognize global host OS keys. This will be handy when one uses virtual desktops so that the VM can be in one desktop and regular Mac OS on another one and can toggle to them easily. Right now, I have to move the mouse to the upper top and get the VMWare menu to be displayed; then it starts recognizing the global keys for the host OS.
5. When connected to external display, the actual boot is not displayed on external monitor; and it only displays when the actual OS starts booting. This makes it hard if one wants to control which OS to boot.
6. Support for the snapshots for the bootcamp version of OS could be a great addition.
7. Support of Unity feature from VMWare Fusion for the bootcamp Vista OS could be another addition. I heard it works for XP. Not sure if Parallels coherence works with Bootcamp Vista.
8. Macbook should be smart enough to turn off the primary display by recognizing the external display unless its in mirror mode.
9. Bootcamp, VMWare and Parallels should recognize the Windows Vista and automatically provide a way to remap the keys in guest OS (particularly the Delete key)
10. Finally, but not least; Apple should make iSight to actually work on Windows instead of just the driver by providing a nice UI.

Recently after upgrading to Bootcamp 1.3; I noticed that when working under Windows Vista under direct dual boot Bootcamp; at times; the Macbook pro automatically exists the OS and restarts back without even any problem indication. This is annoy at times without any issues. This indicates that this is not an OS issue, instead something todo with Macbook pro or Bootcamp. I also upgraded the Mac Drivers from 1.2 to 1.3 by re-creating the drivers CD from the Bootcamp Asssistant; but still no luck.

In a side note; I also noticed when the Windows prompts Windows Error Recovery screen during the boot when the OS shuts abnormally; I see the Macbook keyboard doesn’t work; so I have to wait till it completes 28 sec nor it allowed to to select alternative boot options as the none of the keys works.

Also; when the battery drains out of the Macbook on Vista; I never get any critical battery alarm before it shuts off; Macbook seemed to shutoff the OS suddenly without even any alarm even though it seemed to be configured.