ESXi 4 + Win2008 R2 + shared folder on disk D = access denied

[klima]

I have a problem.

Then i install windows server 2008 r2 as guest OS on VMWare ESXi4, add new hard drive (virtual disk or RAW) to guest system and shared folder on disk (or any other no-system disk) - i can't get access to this share from network.

On system disk C, all worksfine!

On windows server 2003 r2 system all works fine too.

I have 4 virtual machine, where i use data disk (D,E,F and other) - all of them have same problem.

My virual machines are located on 2 ESXi servers.

Windows firewall is desable!

All ntfs and share's permission set property!

[Ramzy201110141]

Hello Dear,

I am having the the same problem. can you please advise if you found any solution?

many thanks

[DCjay]

Hello,

This issue is windows NTFS perimsion issue. It not ESXi 4 problem.

What is the share permission setting on d drive?

I will recommend  giving rea and write permission to everyone on share, then

user NTFS permission to restrict users.

Hope this helps.

[Ramzy201110141]

Hi,

I gave the users full control for share and NTFS on both D drive and the folder with no luck, any other ideas?

thanks for replying 

[DCjay]

Give  everyone read/write share permission.

[Ramzy201110141]

didn't work

to add more info I tried to access the folder from another vm while login as a domain admin and still didnt work

[Ramzy201110141]

Finally found the solution

after more than one week of troubleshooting something from the era of ignorance it turns to be directed to policy that I have in my domain which is

"disabling removable storage"

as it seems the VMware consider the RDM disk as removable storage so it would not let you access it from the network even that you can access while you are in remote session for some reason

Even after linking a policy that I have that revert the disabling policy to enable the removable storage its still didn't work, so I removed both of them and shared worked again perfectly !!!

and to add more information for those whose interesting check the below links that explain one of the problems that this policy have and how it might be related to the services starting sequence while window is starting

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979621

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969702

best wishes

Ramzy

[DCjay]

Awesome, I am glad it worked.

[BRumer0]

We were racking our brains for the last week with this. The timing of some GPO changes, and our upgrade to ESXi 5, made us think it was something to do with ESXi 5. I couldnt even find this thread initially because I was looking for ESXi 5 solutions. This is exactly the same problem that we had, and the GPO was the culprit. It took 2 reboots for the share to work (even with doing a gpupdate /force prior to reboot). Thanks for posting the solution.

additional keywords: vmdk, partition, volume, vsphere, windows