Mount VMware images (.vmwarevm) in Snow Leopard with MacFuse

Snow Leopard removed the extended file context menus, which for VMware gave the option to mount .vmwarevm files with MacFuse.

Is there a way to mount the .vmwarevm files in Snow Leopard? I'm using MacFuse 2.1.5 Beta.

One workaround is to drag and drop your .vmwarevm file onto the VMDKMounter application. Another is to right click on your .vmwarevm file and choose Open With... and find the VMDKMounter application.

You can find VMDKMounter.app in /Library/Application Suport/VMWare Fusion/.

One last alternative is to use open from the command line.

open -a /Library/Application\ Support/VMWare\ Fusion/VMDKMounter.app /PATH/TO/Machine.vmwarevm

You could try making a service to do this as well but I suspect that VMWare in their next update will include an updated contextual menu item.

Note: Above applies to Fusion v3. VMDKMounter was removed from v4 and v5. See http://communities.vmware.com/message/1827723#1827723

More recent versions of Snow Leopard and/or VMware Fusion allow to mount a Virtual Machine by right-clicking on the VM file and choosing the VMDKMounter application.

However, VMDKMounter uses MacFuse which, unfortunately, is no longer maintained. More details can be found in this article of the VMware Knowledge Base.

Please consider also that, even if you have MacFuse installed, you can mount the VM under Snow Leopard only with the 32-bit kernel. To use this kernel you need to reboot the your Mac while holding the 3 and 2 keys.