All of my prior experience with Fusion has been using the standard internal HD with a Mac OS partition and a Windows (Bootcamp) partition. Creating a Fusion (Windows) volume with this setup was super easy.
My new setup is a new Mac Pro (late 2013) - with an internal OS X Mavericks drive, and an external Thunderbolt Windows 8.1 drive. Booting Windows using the external Thunderbolt driver under EFI is flawless and super easy.
I guess I was blissfully ignorant in thinking that VMWare Fusion would just as easily work with this configuration as all of my previous configurations. I have had no luck so far in figuring out how to creat a VM out of the Thunderbolt Windows drive.
So, just in case the obvious is suppose to work - these are the (obvious) steps used to attempt to create a VM:
1) Create a New BootCamp Volume
2) Choose the option "Create a Boot Camp virtual machine" - VMWare Fusion will create a virtual machine that uses your Boot Camp volume directly
* Note - my external HD Boot Camp volume is properly recognized and selected
3) Select "Continue" to create the Boot Camp VM Disk
4) Message recieved that "Configuration of the virtual machine is now complete"
- Operating System Windows 8 x 64
However, whenever the VM tries to start up I get s screen which shows the following:
-> EFI VMWare Virtual IDE Hard Driver (IDE 0:0)... unsuccessful.
-> EFI VMWare Virtual SATA CDROM Drive (1.0)... unsuccessful.
-> EFI Network...
And then a message pops up that says: "No Operating System Was Found. Check your Startup Disk in the virtual machine settings. If you have not installed an operating system yet, you can choose an installation disc or disc image in the CD/DVD settings and restart the virtual machine."
What am I missing? Is it not possible to use an external Windows volume for a VM? I mean, it's 2014 now... We have been using external HD OS volumes for many years now, right?