USB Drive will not mount in OSX Guest in VMWare Fusion

Solution 1:

I dont know if this problem is still up to date, but here is a solution I found which works pretty well:

First of all we should to figure out our hard drive name:

launch Disk Utility (select Finder, click on the Go menu, select Utilities, launch Disk Utility.app)

Select your hard drive and press Info button on the top-left.

Remember the Disk Identifier specified in the Information window ("disk1" in my case).
Fire up Terminal.app (it is also located in the Utilities folder) Change current directory in Terminal to the WMware.app Contents/Library folder (you can simply copy and paste the following line:

cd "/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/"

Now we should create a .vmdk file that will point to our external hard drive:
paste the following line into the terminal (change disk1 to the disk name you've found in the step 1):

./vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk1 fullDevice ~/external-hdd ide

This will create a new external-hdd.vmdk file in your home folder.
OK, we're almost done. Now let's find our VMware guest OS container and add to it just created link to our hard drive.

• Open Finder and go to a folder where your virtual machines are located. (Documents › Virtual Machines in my case)

• Do a right click on desired Virtual Machine to display a pop-up menu, select "Show Package Contents" this will allows us to view a directory with all corresponding files to this VM.

• Move or copy external-hdd.vmdk from your home folder into this one. Do a right click on a file named like current VM with .vmx extension, select Open With › TextEdit

• Scroll to the end of file and add the following lines:

  ide1:1.present = "TRUE"
  ide1:1.fileName = "external-hdd.vmdk"
  

  Save and quit

That's it, now you can launch VM with attached external HDD or SDD!