VMware Vista Physical Disk Helper device not working for some VM's.

[SteveNetAdmin]

I have handful of Win2k8 64bit vm's on esx5.5 update 2 that are showing "VMware Vista Physical Disk Helper" have the error 'This device is not present, is not working properly, or does not have all its drivers installed. (Code 24)'. The VMware Tools versions vary, either 9.4.0 build-1585188, 9.4.5 build-1598834, or 9.4.10 build-2068191.

Google has failed me for the most part. I can't find any concrete information on what this virtual device is or what it does specifically, except that it may be involved in creating quiesced snapshots.

Also, the device appears to be attached to the vmrawdsk service, which doesn't exist on the server. These VM's were not P2V, they were created from win iso.

Any guesses on what this is and how I might be able to fix it?

[Alistar]

This looks like a RDM issue - are you using Raw Device Mapping for your Windows Server VMs by any chance? Or are the VMs stored on a VMFS datastore?

[SteveNetAdmin]

All VMFS datastores. We have no raw devices mapped, it's all VMFS and vmdk's.

[Alistar]

So something leads the VMware tools to believe that there is a Raw Device mapped - is there any way you can purge the tools at least from one of the servers and installing newest version again? If you think this may be related to quiesced snapshots, is there any other service handling the quiescing than VSS Provider? Perhaps it could be a third-party quiescing issue.

Also maybe the .vmx file got crazy somehow - I'd try un-registering the virtual machine, creating a new empty box and map the .vmdks there.

[SteveNetAdmin]

We do use a third party tool for taking backups. I don't know if it quiesces or not. I'm not entirely sure what that even means after reading the wiki page on it. Right now I'm trying the uninstall, reboot, reinstall approach on one of the servers.

[Alistar]

Quiescing is an act of telling the filesystem to "finish all pending IOs, freeze and then take a snapshot for the data to be in a consistent state" - this is especially important for database servers for example, when all data needs to be 100% consistent for the point-in-time this snapshot was taken.

Anyways, good luck!

[SteveNetAdmin · Accepted solution]

I got it working on a server my copying over the missing vmrawdsk.sys file from a known good server, uninstalling VMware Tools, reboot, reinstall it, and reboot again. Then the VMware Vista Physical Disk Helper device / vmrawdisk service are working normally.

[Alistar]

That's great! Congrats on solving the issue

[Billho201110141]

Dear Steve,

It's a bit branch out, but I see you mentioned the VMware Tools version is 9.4.0 1585188. Do you know which ESXi version (VMware? HP? IBM?) the vmware tools come from? I hit an issue and supports point out this version is not recorded ever in their DB and thus not there in their repository (Index of /45848/tools).

Thanks.

Bill

[Jakester48]

I am running VMware Workstation Pro 12 version 12.5.9 on Windows 7 Professional. Most of my VM's are Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. One is Windows 7 Pro 32 bit.

Where is the vmrawdsk.sys or is it relevant on VMware Workstation Pro 12?