Adding an “Existing (Boot Camp) Hard Disk” to VMWare Fusion for Mac

Mac users may have noticed that they can’t add an “Existing Hard Disk” which may be another NTFS Windows partition which makes it difficult if that partition is mapped to User directories, thankfully its a fairly simple procedure to add several partition to your scheme though it’s not really posted anywhere on VMWare’s help.

First thing you do is Add a New Boot Camp…

Create a VMware virtual machine that uses your Boot Camp volume for each one of your partitions (the Disk Size is the only identifier for you to tell them apart).

Once you’ve created your “Boot Camp” partitions, right click anyone of them in VMware and click “Show in Finder”, let’s call the partition you boot with, “Boot Camp” and the seperate drive I will be adding is named after it’s size, right click the drive that is not your boot partition and “Show Package Contents”.

These partitions can be renamed however you like but the easiest way is to start them in VMware Fusion so that it recoginizes that file changes have occured, For simplicity sake, I left the names as Boot Camp and Boot Camp 2, start off by deleting the Boot Camp X.vmx and then copy the remaining files minus vmware.log.

Go back to ~/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines and select your boot partition, right click and show it’s contents, paste your files and then right click the Boot Camp X.vmx file and open it with TextEdit.

Now just duplicate the following 3 lines:

Make sure you change the partition’s location (ide0:x) and not just the fileName representing the other partitions.

When you start the VM, tell VMware you moved it and you should be good to go, if you can’t boot just swap the partition order, as you may have mixed up your boot drive.

Good Luck

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How-to setup Seneca LearnID @myseneca.ca with Email Clients and Devices (e.g. Android, iOS, Windows, etc)

Recently Seneca dropped the mail server (@learn.senecac.on.ca) used for students and adapted a business account with Outlook Office 365 (@myseneca.ca) which has replaced the previous IMAP/POP settings for synchronizing your email and also added a nice 25 GB cap.

Thankfully the TLS authentication is an optional configuration (a vulnerability in TLS renegotiations was discovered) and now we have Exchange support for all devices which I highly recommend for your configuration. If you aren’t sure how the mail protocols work or haven’t taken OPS335, this is a good read to get you started but essentially:

Exchange: Support for syncing/pushing email/calendar/contacts, time-framed email syncing plus enhanced Android control allowing for text-messaging syncing and device security via security update (not sure about iOS)

IMAP: Syncs the same mailbox(s) across all devices

POP3: Each POP3 device receives an email and read notifications aren’t synced, I would not recommend POP3 but I’m sure some people still use it.

Exchange

Server name: outlook.office365.com

Domain: Blank

Username: learnid@myseneca.ca

Encryption method: SSL (Accept all SSL certificates)

Port: 443

*If you configure this on an android device, you’ll get a request to install a security update, once this is done, you can go to the Settings/Options/Phone in your Seneca mailbox online and wipe/lock your phone remotely or enable SMS syncing which allows you to receive texts to your Seneca inbox and also reply with emails which will be sent as texts.

If you don’t have support for Exchange, use IMAP:

 

IMAP

Server name: outlook.office365.com

Domain: Blank

Username: learnid@myseneca.ca

Encryption method: SSL (Accept all SSL certificates)

Port: 993

 

SMTP

Server name: smtp.office365.com

Domain: Blank

Username: learnid@myseneca.ca

Encryption method: TLS

Port: 587

 

 

These default settings are easy to remember and should always work but if the office365 server alias isn’t working or should you want to use POP3 messaging, the details for manually configuring the mail server are below:

 

Exchange setting (Incoming/Outgoing) *Server name: by2prd0710.outlook.com or pod51018.outlook.com Domain: Blank Username: learnid@myseneca.ca Encryption method: SSL FIXED *Ideally the server would be office.outlook365.com and the username would be your learnID but this configuration failed on my Android device and thus I used a blank domain with success, if you have an iOS device and this setup fails, try separating the domain and username.

*POP setting (Incoming) Server name: pod51018.outlook.com Username: learnid@myseneca.ca Port: 995 Encryption method: SSL *Keep in mind POP servers remove the original copy of the message when downloading to a mail client disabling the ability to sync across multiple devices.

IMAP setting (Incoming) Server name: pod51018.outlook.com Username: learnid@myseneca.ca Port: 993 Encryption method: SSL

SMTP setting (Outgoing) Server name: pod51018.outlook.com Username: learnid@myseneca.ca Port: 587 *Encryption method: TLS Uses Authentication: Yes *Due to the vulnerability I mentioned, Microsoft Windows 8 (and likely Windows devices) do not support TLS on SMTP configured clients and will be able to receive but not send email.