Trying to add a SATA HDD that is connected by a USB dock attached to my laptop that is running Workstation 8.0.6.
Editing the vm, I choose add a physical disk, but the next screen has a dropdown that only shows physicaldisk0 and not the external disk.
Windows diskmanager shows the external HDD as 'disk 1' and I have removed all drive letters.
I tried marking the disk offline in diskpart, and it did not help - the drive still does not show up in the dropdown box.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
The drive is readable and writeable by the Win 7 host if marked online and assigned a drive letter to make it available, so I know the drive is healthy.
Hi,
Please, look to this documentation and follows the steps:
VMware Workstation Documentation Center
The USB, firewire, SD or MMC devices are skipped by design. There should be message in worker log.
HTH
Daniel thanks for the article link, and I believe I have done what is indicated there for a Win 7 host.
Basically, I have removed the drive letters from the external drive in Windows diskmanagement, and 'unmounted' the drive, I think, by setting it offline using diskpart.
And I am not trying to use the host laptop system partition/disk, this is a different and external drive. Should show up as physicaldisk1 in the 'add' dialog dropdown, but it does not. There is no error message, just isn't there.
Is there something special that needs to be done in Workstation 8 to recognize an external USB physical drive? I will say I've had no trouble using Workstation 8 to write output to usb-attached drives in the past, even using the same drive dock. But in this case I would like to add the external drive to a new vm guest, one step in trying to do a p2v for a dead computer. But so far, I am stuck at the step of trying to get Workstation to allow me to add it.
POCEH, thanks.
I'm not sure what worker logs you mean, but I've searched through quite a few logs and haven't come away with any evidence about a problem detecting the device. But I certainly could have missed something. If you could give me a more specific place to look and the type of message I'm looking for, that would be very helpful to me.
But are you sure that USB-connected SATA hard drives are not eligible to add to virtual guests by design? There seem to be numerous articles that indicate USB is supported by WS 8, like KB 2019644 (sorry I don't know how to insert a link to it here). Could you point me to any documentation on what types of connections actually work for external drives, I can't seem to find that either?
From log bundle - look for, including in contained zip files too, vmware-converter-worker log. There should be an message similar to
"[19072 warning 'Default'] Device is USB, firewire, SD, or MMC \\.\PhysicalDrive1".
The idea of skipping such disk is simple - the destination hardware is not same as source one and in most cases there is no equvalent hardware on destination.
For Workstation - you not need to convert USB devices because you can use USB passthrough function.
HTH
POCEH, thank you again.
I realize now that I've started this question in the Converter topic but should have probably posted under Workstation and I regret the confusion this may have caused.
However, I understand your point about Workstation not normally needing to treat USB hard drives as physical drives since vm guests can access as a passthrough. That's right of course. My case is that I'm trying to follow this advice, which I've seen from other posts here, to convert the contents of a hard drive from a failed system to a vmdk
1- attach the disk in a USB enclosure to a host with Workstation
2- create new VM and add the USB-disk as physical disk - name the vmdk "import.vmdk"
3- do not start the VM
4- clone the "import.vmdk" with vmware-vdiskmanager
vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -r "import.vmdk" -t 0 "new.vmdk"
5- in the VM replace "import.vmdk" with "new.vmdk"
6- start Converter and run "configure machine" against the VM
7- when that is done you can start the VM for the first time
I'm still stuck on the second step. I've seen this advice so many times that I just accepted that Workstation would allow step 2, but if it is not designed to do it, I'll accept that and move on to discover other solutions to image the drive into a .vmdk for the Converter. I believe you must be right that Converter won't convert a USB disk, but fortunately I don't have that particular problem. I'm hoping there is a trick to step 2 that someone who has done p2v conversion this way might be able to spot. Is it truly not possible for Workstation to add a USB-connected disk as a physical drive to a vm, or if possible... how to do it?
I hope this is more clear, and my apologies for not explaining the point of why I want to connect a physical drive to a vm.
I see... there is tricky solution for you - create the wrapper VMDK file and transfer your problematic disk, follow the instruction here: http://sanbarrow.com/vmdk-basics.html#physical
HTH
POCEH,
sorry for the long delay in reporting back. The sanbarrow site you mention is full of good info, thank you for that informative link. But I solved my problem accidentally.
I shutdown WS 8 after connecting the external drive and setting it offline with diskpart.
When I restarted WS 8 it recognized the physical drive and made it available in the dropdown. Apparently the drive has to be available to be discovered by starting WS 8 fresh, it is not discovered by a running instance.
I can't believe it took so long for me to realize this! Problem solved now, and I was able to successfully go on and have vdiskmanager to image the physical drive.
