jim.gill wrote: I see. What you omitted in manual partitioning is setting up an corresponding entry in the Protective MBR of the drive. When Boot Camp sets up a partition for Windows, it creates an entry in the GPT *and* an entry in the protective MBR (a "hybrid" partition table, necessary because Windows XP does not boot from GPT). It's the MBR that Fusion 5 reads when scanning for boot camp partitions.
Personally I do not allow VMware Fusion (or Parallels for that matter) to touch my Boot Camp partition however in the last 5 years I've rebuilt my previous Mac a number of times and didn't use the Boot Camp Assistant since I had already repartition the Macintosh HD to have a separate Data Volume and as such had to use Disk Utility again to create the Boot Camp partition as the Boot Camp Assistant will not do it if the disk has already been partitioned. Now in each of these times I rebuilt and didn't use the Boot Camp Assistant nonetheless VMware Fusion would automatically create an entry in the Virtual Machine Library for the Windows install of the manually created (using Disk Utility) Boot Camp partition. Now I didn't run the Boot Camp partition Virtual Machine and deleted it from the virtual Machine Library however that seems to contradict what you've said. Any guess as to why it apparently must have updated the Protective MBR since VMware Fusion had no problem creating an initial entry on the Virtual Machine Library. Isn't that VMware Fusion automatically recognizing the existence of an Protective MBR entry? Also understand that this would have been with version 2.x and mostly with 3.x as I never ran 4.x and only switch to 5.x with the purchase of a new 2013 MacBoo Pro. I have not yet divided my SSD and I doubt that I will install Window natively as I just do not have a need for Windows outside of a Virtual Machine anymore.
Is this a case of I followed the directions to reformat the FAT32 to NTFS and not delete/recreate the partition during the install vs what resonanttoe may have done and using GPT?