VMWare with physical partions in a dynamic disk?

Question

Background: Host OS is Windows Vista. Guest OS is Ubuntu

VMWare can give direct access to a guest OS to a physical disk partition, so say my disk has two partitions, the first is NTFS and has windows on it, and the second is EXT3, obviously not readable from windows. I can then run VMWare, and give Ubuntu access to that second partition, and he can mount it and access all the data and so on.

However, I just converted my disk in windows into a 'Dynamic Disk'...and now VMWare can't see the individual partitions. Instead it just sees a single partition the size of the entire disk.

Is there any way to give the ext3 partition, which is now inside a windows dynamic disk, to the vmware instance? I know of LDM, but that only works when linux has full access to the entire disk, and I just want to give it access to a single partition.

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 04 '09 at 17:16

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Dynamic disks are only understood and supported by Windows systems, nobody else can make use of them.

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_disk_dynamic_win2kxp_do_not_use.html

answered Oct 04 '09 at 17:16

Massimo

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Darn...that ruins my whole plan...thanks for the link. Hopefully someone else chimes in with a workaround. PS: Dynamic disks can be read by Linux systems, see my LDM link above, so not completely windows only. – davr Oct 04 '09 at 22:30

JamesRyan · Accepted Answer · 2009-10-05T15:54:05.120

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You could just copy the partition into a VMDK file based partition and store it inside the dynamic disk. The difference in performance is negligable when you use a fixed size rather than a growing one.

edited Oct 05 '09 at 15:54

answered Oct 05 '09 at 15:42

JamesRyan

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Yeah, I think I'm going to do something like this, thanks for the tip. – davr Oct 05 '09 at 17:07

VMWare with physical partions in a dynamic disk?

2 Answers2