Do you men this? VMware Knowledge Base
I'e created rawdisk files successfully, by seems VMFusion 11 doesn't like it: "VMX file is corrupted"
ide0:1.present = "TRUE"
ide0:1.fileName = ""
ide0:1.deviceType = "<parth to .vmk file created from diskcreator"
suspend.disabled = "TRUE"
The VM file itself is hosted on the same drive, but not on the same volume
eg.. the physical external usb drive is hybrib (HFS partiition, + Fat32)
The 'diskcreator' command points to the right volume, but perhaps its not working because the drive is multi-partition ?