Degutis Insights

Running Vista Business with VMWare Fusion on my iMac is slower than running it on my Macbook Pro. They have the same amount of memory and the Macbook Pro does have a slightly faster processor, but it seems like the hard drive might be the bottleneck. The main difference between the two is the Macbook Pro has Vista installed on the Boot Camp partition from which Fusion runs it, while the iMac has it as a file-based VM. Thinking it would run faster from a Boot Camp partition, I attempted to use Vista’s Complete PC Backup and Restore feature to try and “move” the existing file-based VM to a Boot Camp Partition. Here’s what I tried:

1. Booted Vista in VMWare Fusion using the file-based VM.
2. Connected a USB drive.
3. Performed a Complete PC Backup in Vista.
4. Shutdown the VM.
5. Started the Boot Camp Assistant and partitioned the iMac with a 32 GB partition for Vista (same as the file-based VM).
6. Booted into Boot Camp using the Vista install CD.
7. Instead of installing Vista, I chose the Repair option and then Restore.
8. It found the external drive and it said it was going to restore it to the 32 GB partition. Once it completed, it had completely blown away the Leopard installation, leaving only Vista on the iMac.
9. I was able to recover using my Time Machine backup. (Thank goodness!)

There has to be some way of accomplishing this. The goal is to move Vista and the installed applications to the Boot Camp partition. My data is stored on a server so there is no need to mess with user migration tools which only handle data.

Anyone?

-Al