[John Rofrano]

[Winston A. Cely] “Could you post a link to the process of making a bootable thumb drive?”

Here is a link to some articles from Other World Computing (OWC) on making a bootable thumb drive installers:

Bootable macOS Installer

You will actually need two drives. One for the installer, and one for the target you want to install to. After you make the installer, you boot with that. Then plug in the second thumb drive or any external USB drive and use that as the target drive for the installer. This will install macOS on the second drive which you can then boot from to use.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

I don’t have Catalina so I don’t know what the Music app looks like (and now I’m not looking forward to it because I have my own custom ring tone that I created as well)

Have you looked for them on the filesystem? Is there still an iTunes folder? The ring tones were under:

iTunes -> iTunes Media -> Tones

One of the beautiful things about a Mac is that you can install macOS on a thumb drive and boot from it. Just get an older version of macOS (probably an OS X version) that had the iTunes functionality you need and boot off it and backup your ring tones from there.

I actually have several macOS boot partitions that allow me to go back and use older programs that I need which are no longer supported.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

Sounds like a plan Todd, I’m always here if you have more questions. Good Luck!

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[anna norton] “It worked!”

Way to GO! I’m glad that worked out for you. I learned something myself because I didn’t realize that Apple had hidden the devices until I researched the problem for you. So we both learned something.

Take care! ?

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[anna norton] “What am I missing?”

You are missing the Devices. Let me explain… ?

You know they say, “A picture is worth a thousand words”

Apple, in it’s infinite quest for making computers easy to use, have made them too simplistic. The default for Disk Utility use to be to show Devices. Now, apparently, the default is to only show Volumes.

This is evident from your screen capture. Those are Volumes not Devices.

So you are not selecting the devices because the devices are HIDDEN!!! (What was Apple thinking???) This is why it’s not working.

The fix is to change your view. Open the menu in the upper left and select Show All Devices. Now the devices will be shown on the left.

Now Erase should work as we previously described.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

To erase the entire disk and repartition as one partition you must select the actual device and not any partition.

Like this:

That will erase the entire drive leaving only a single partition.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

As Patrick illustrated with the picture in his post, you need to select the entire drive not any one partition. Erasing the drive will create a new single partition using all of the space on the drive.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

Let’s understand what the error message you got in Disk Utility because you should not need to use cryptic terminal commands to do this.

All you need to do is open Disk Utility. Select the disk and press the Erase icon. That’s it! It should prompt you to erase and create a new single partition.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

The share is both ways. If you create a folder on the Mac and share it inside of the virtual machine, the same folder is still available on your Mac so you can modify files from either and both will see the changes. Likewise backing them up on the Mac will also back them up for the virtual machine since it is the same folder (i.e., only one copy of then files)

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

Great questions. Let me try and explain…

[Todd Gruel] “Since I don’t know what my needs are, is it best to choose a more generic virtual hard drive type that might be compatible with other virtualisation software: Virtual Hard Disk or Virtual Machine Disk? What is the difference?”

I understand that you might change you mind but it’s usually best to stick with the native format for the virtualization software that you will use. Most will convert between formats anyway so you are not really locked in. This is the difference:

• VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image) is the native format for VirtualBox
• VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) is the native format for Microsoft Hyper-V
• VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) is the native format for VMWare

I realize that the allure of “free” is great… but Parallels Desktop would be a much more user friendly experience for a beginner and they do have a free trial.

[Todd Gruel] “Also, I noticed that I have the VMware Player, too. How does this differ from VirtualBox or the other virtualisation programs?”

VMware Player is free software from VMware that allows you to use Virtual Machines that other people create images for. You cannot create a new image, but you can download images from the internet or co-workers and use them without having to buy a VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion license.

[Todd Gruel] “Can the dragging and dropping of files and folders that you’ve described within VMware also be done within VirtualBox?”

Yes, all three packages, (VMware, VirtualBox, and Parallels) have this capability.

[Todd Gruel] “I’ve downloaded the trail of Beyond Compare. It’s expensive! But if I understand correctly, any of these virtualisation programs will be compatible with Mac backup programs, right? Since I’m not using BootCamp, will I be able to use Carbon Copy Cloner, for example, to bar up my virtual drive?”

Yes, if you share a folder from your host side of the virtual machine the files will actually only exist on your Mac and you can use CCC to back them up.

[Todd Gruel] “Upon looking at Virtual Box again, it appears that I have to create a separate destination folder for each Windows OS? Does that mean that the folders can’t share content? Can I not then use another virtualisation software later to access those folders?”

No, that folder is for the virtual machine files. It contains metadata about how much cpu and memory and what networks to use. It also contains the .vdi/.vhd/.vmdk file which represents the disk images for the C: drive of the virtual machine. It is specific to the virtualization software that you are using. However, other virtualization software have the ability to import the C: drive to a new virtual machine which they will keep in their folder structure.

The virtual machine is just a collection of files on your Mac. They have to live somewhere, and so all of the hypervisors create a folder for each virtual machine to store these files. (“hypervisor” is the generic term use to describe virtualization software) This has nothing to do with file sharing.

Hope that clears up some confusion. If not, keep asking. ?

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com