Mount Support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 Server R2 Guests

[kevinols]

When is support for mounting Windows 7 and Windows 8 Server R2 guests planned?

Currently, vmware-mount.exe completes successfully but there are no files/directories visble in the mapped drive. This occurs with both versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the VDDk.

When I mount using VixMntAPI in VDDK 1.1 I see a few files and directories from my local c: drive under the symbolic link.

I am using a .vmdk files from VMware Workstation.

Kevin

[fixitchris]

Are you running vmware-mount as administrator ?

[kevinols]

Yes I am running vmware-mount as administrator. I can change to that drive and list the contents but the contents are from a portion of my local filesystem not the mounted filesystem.

When I don't run it as administrator, vmware-mount returns without an error. However when changing to that drive or listing its contents I get error 'The system cannot find the drive specified'.

I am running on Server 2008.

[fixitchris]

Are you aware that even though you might be logged on to Windows 2008 as a Domain Admin or Administrator your access tokens are split into two: regular user and elevated privilage. All apps are launched as the regular user unless explicitly specified to run as admin.

"When logging in as a user in the Administrators group, two separate tokens are assigned. The first token contains all privileges typically awarded to an administrator, and the second is a restricted token similar to what a standard user would receive."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control

Do this, run one CMD as admin and run one CMD as yourself.

Issue NET USE in each CMD window. See the difference?

Most likely vmware-mount will not work correctly when ran from the regular user CMD. Not enough permissions to do much of any IO access.

In the admin CMD do NET USE drive_letter: /DELETE to free up a drive letter. Now try again vmware-mount on an available drive letter from the admin CMD.

[kevinols]

I have been running it from an admin command window. I am able to successfully mount XP and Vista but not Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. I tried all 4 VMs from an XP system with the same results.

When mounting Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2, vmware-mount does succeed but the only files/directories I see in the mapped drive are:

Boot (directory)

bootmgr

BOOTSECT.BAK

System Volume Information (directory)

These files/directories are not from the mounted system they are from my local system (although the all of the dates and some of the file sizes are different).

I copied a file to the mounted drive then dismounted it and started the VM with VMWare Workstation. The file was not anywhere on the running VM. It was also not anywhere on my local system. When I mounted the vmdk file again, the file I copied was still there. When I tried this test on the XP and Vista VMs the file was in the root directory of the running VM as expected.

The only 2 possibilities I see are:

1) Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 are not supported by the current version of the VDDK (maybe due to file system changes?).

2) When I created the Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 VMs, I configured them in a manner that was not supported by the VDDK.

[fixitchris]

What is the output of :

vmware-mount /p "disk.vmdk"

I just mounted a Server 2.0, Windows 2008 Std x86 successfully with VDDK 1.0.

Can you post some logs from ":\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temp\vmware-user*" (or the Server 2008 equivalent location)?

[kevinols]

The vmare-mopunt /p option did the trick. It turns out that Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 create an additional partition automatically. I did not look for additional partitions as I didn't think there were any.

Thanks for the help.

[fixitchris]

Cool.

[Grami]

I have the same problem.

Your recommendation for direct using vmware-mount.exe helps.

But!!!

1. I see my virtual disk only from cmd.exe, not from Browser. My host is Vista.

2. In all cases I can't mount Windows 7 via standart: Edit Virtual Machine Setting -> Hard Disk -> Utilities -> Map -> Chose 2nd partition -> Open File Read Only Mode check Out -> Ok.

It is seen as bug, because it opens 1st partition any other volume beside Windows 7 and even Win7 in read-only mode.

I even ordered and setup VMWare 7 which has to support Windows 7. The same problem.

Help, please...