Despite some quirky problems, I’ve been using Garmin Edge devices (first a 500, now a 510) for the last couple of years when cycling in order to track and display various statistics. This has generally worked well, but throughout all of this I’d had one overriding problem which wasn’t serious enough to properly dig into until this past weekend: the unit would not always mount (show up in Finder) when I plugged it into my Mac.
The original problem that I’d had with both the units was that, sometimes, plugging the device into a Mac would result in it not mounting, but unplugging it, waiting a few seconds, and plugging it back in would then work. I was content with this for a while and there was no obvious correlation between when it’d happen and wouldn’t, but a few days ago the Garmin Edge 510 stopped mounting at all. I figured nothing was wrong with the Edge 510 because it would mount perfectly fine on a Windows box, so I began looking at the Mac.
In the end the problem has turned out to be VMware Fusion. While I haven’t proved it, it also seems that the upgrade to Fusion 6.0.2 (from 6.0.1) last week changed the problem from sometimes to always and I could not get the Garmin to mount at all. After some thinking and testing I narrowed it down to only occurring when VMware Fusion was running a virtual machine with a USB controller.
VMware has published knowledge base article 1025256 to help one troubleshoot such issues and find workarounds by including quirks definitions in the VMX files, but none of these recommendations worked for my Edge 510, so I opened a support request (#13413345912). I’ve been emailing back and forth with VMware support and the assigned support person seems to be working on it, so hopefully the information I’ve provided them will lead them to developing a proper fix for it. (If/when I receive a fix I’ll update this post.)
In the mean time I’ll just leave the USB controller disconnected from the VM that I have running most frequently. This allows things to work, and as I rarely use USB passthrough it’s a fair trade.
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The software / hardware versions when replicating the issue are as follows:
Apple iMac: iMac11,3, OS X 10.9 (13A603)
Garmin Edge 510: IC: 1792A-020, FCC ID: IPH-02069, firmware 2.80.
VMware Fusion: 6.0.2 (1398658)