Importing a VMware Fusion 2.0.6 VM

Importing a VMware Fusion 2.0.6 VM [Better version]

Since the reason I came over to Parallels was inability to get Fusion 3 to work, all of the following relates to a 2.0.6 guest. I strongly suspect the same process will be helpful for F3, but I can't promise of course.

Here is what I learned at pretty considerable cost of time and patience through 4 sad conversations with tech support and a couple of hints on the forum....

The basic instructions for importing VMware are okay (except for stuff about Transporter - see below). They just are not complete.

First thing is to back up your Fusion VM if possible. Basic but has to be said.

Second, start your VM and uninstall (from Add/Remove control panel) any and all anti-virus and operational aid software. In particular, uninstall everything Norton or Symantec have ever produced. In particular, uninstall GoBack (which takes a while if you've been using it since it must erase a lot of data it's been keeping for you).

Then uninstall VMware Tools using the same control panel. If for some reason you can't access VMware Tools through the control panel, use the Fusion Virtual Machine menu to uninstall (making sure you also have McAfee uninstalled first).

Locate your C drive, right click, select Tools tab, and schedule a Disk Cleanup for when you restart. Do not check the option to perform a sector check.

Restart the guest to solidify the removals, of course ignoring all urging to install Tools, and log into your account after the disk check finishes.

Once you're sure the guest has restarted cleanly without any anti-virus or Tools, shut it down and quit Fusion.

Start Parallels 5 and select Import from File menu. That starts Transporter. Ignore the incredibly inept instructions that tell you to look for a folder and start Transporter from within the folder. There is no folder. It's all integrated in the P5 package now.

Follow the prompts to import the VM. I took some advice I picked up on one of the endless tech calls to use only a single processor in preferences for the new machine. You can change it later. No idea if it matters, but it's easier to do it and change it later than to find out if it will give you trouble not to.

I imported to a partition on an external FW drive. When you are finished, you should have a file that ends with .pvm.

From that point you should be home free.

Hope this helps someone. It's been about a week since I went through all this, and I may have neglected a step. Think I covered everything that confused me.