topic How Add Old NTF Drive Into Windows VM Without Formating and Without Converting Into ESXi Datastore? in ESXi Discussions

How Add Old NTF Drive Into Windows VM Without Formating and Without Converting Into ESXi Datastore?

sorspet — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 21:25:45 GMT

How Add Old NTF Drive Into Windows VM Without Formating and Without Converting Into ESXi Datastore?

This is a physical NTFS hard drive and must be seen only for windows virtual machine.

> Edit VM > And then what? HDD is only device and it is not part of the Datastore. I have ID, Path and that is all.

The answer is RDM. Good. Now we need documentation t9 be read first.

Re: Add Old NTF Drive Without Formating and Without Converting Into ESXi Datastore?

scott28tt — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 21:05:19 GMT

You need ESXi to be able to see the drive (not the NTFS partition, just the physical drive), then give a VM a Raw Device Mapping disk which points to the drive.

Re: Add Old NTF Drive Without Formating and Without Converting Into ESXi Datastore?

sorspet — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 21:08:47 GMT

That is the idea. And how to do this from Esxi > Edit VM > and then what?

Re: Add Old NTF Drive Without Formating and Without Converting Into ESXi Datastore?

sorspet — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 21:13:46 GMT

I can not belive still we do not have single good help to do this very simple thing. For example for VMW Workstation it is very easy. Just chose physical hdd and that is all.

Re: Add Old NTF Drive Without Formating and Without Converting Into ESXi Datastore?

scott28tt — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 09:54:27 GMT

Add a disk to the VM, define that it is a Raw Device Mapping.

It's not different to the Workstation process really - make the host OS see the disk, give the VM access to the disk.

Re: Add Old NTF Drive Without Formating and Without Converting Into ESXi Datastore?

scott28tt — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 09:56:24 GMT

Not sure why you created a second post on the same topic.

The moderators might delete it since this post already has replies.