I decided to give the tool another shot, as I really think the rollback feature would be helpful when testing software packages. It certainly seems quicker to revert to a snapshot instead of re-installing the OS every time I need to test an installer.
I started my test of VMWare Fusion 5 by booting from a USB drive to restore an OS disk image. I followed this article from VMWare on booting from an external USB drive. Once completed, the machine rebooted as I expected. However, what I didn't expect was the failure of my first boot script to correctly install a few packages.
Looking closer at the logs, I noticed that my script used this line to set the internal drive variable "HD_Path", which is used to tell the installer command the path to install the packages to:
HD_Path=`system_profiler SPSerialATADataType|awk -F': ' '/Mount Point/ { print $2}'|head -n1`
(Side Note: The above command has always worked to get the internal disk of a Mac, even when multiple internal and external disks were present OR even if booted from a the network!)
Running the system_profiler command in the terminal of the virtual machine showed me why it failed. Because "system_profiler SPSerialATADataType" returns blank for virtual machines! I found a bug posted here from 2008 that discusses the problem, but does not provide a solution.
So, I may still try to find a place that using VMWare works for me, this doesn't seem to be it. I am not currently wanting to re-writing scripts just to take advantage of snapshots, although I may find it necessary eventually.
If you're in this spot, try using tools like 'diskutil list' and 'df' to get the disk lists.
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