Unable to use physical drive

[townsbg]

I'm trying to attach a secondary drive to my VM however I'm getting the error message that either the device is in use or I don't have permission to use it. What am I doing wrong? Host is Windows 8.1 with workstation 12.5 and the guest is Windows 7.

[RDPetruska]

Read very carefully the Workstation User's Guide on creating VMs with physical disks/partitions.

Workstation must be run As Admin - at least to create it, not sure if also needed each time to run.

The disk MUST NOT be mounted to the host OS - no drive letter assigned, etc. - even if not used.

[townsbg]

The drive doesn't have a drive letter but no matter what options I selected during set up with the drive type or if I would select the option of using the entire drive or select the partition I kept getting an error message that the drive is in use. Then I saw under computer management an offline option. After marking it as offline and rebooting now it works. I get prompted for admin password when I start the VM but that's minor.

[townsbg]

Even though I was able to get the guest to access the drive I started receiving errors that it couldn't access the volume and when I got that I had to reboot so I removed the drive. Vmware said that there are inconsistencies in the volume. Any idea what's wrong?