So the time has come where I want to replace my Bootcamp partition and move to more of a library sort of things.
USB 3.0 External HD Enclosure and a WD 500GB 2.5" SATA III 7200 RPM is enough portable storage for storing my less used VMs and only pull down to the SSD drive the ones I use most.
I'm now at the point, that my Macbook Pro 13" (MacBookPro9,2) is powerful enough to run my work development environments as virtual machines. Bootcamp while does offer better performance, it doesn't offer the ease of being able to juggle / upgrade operating systems.
But, the largest caveat was working with Windows 8 and VMware Fusion being unable to use the built-in tool to convert the partition to a VM.
Instead, I had to use the tool VMware vCenter Converter natively under Windows 8.
Only then after the conversion, it didn't work. :(
After lots of searching I found out that essentially the boot manager needed to be fixed on the VMware new virtual hard disk. So back to MSDN Subscriptions, get the Win8 ISO image and then setup the ISO image to boot before the hard drive.
A thanks to this great VMware KB Article 1037507 , I was able to reset the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) and viola, I can now wipe the partition as my old Windows 8 Bootcamp partition is now a VM. Now I can go and evaluate Windows 8.1 with the new development toolchain as a new VM. More on that later.
