Virtual machine with physical drive?

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joblo37pam

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Jun 28, 2002
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I recently added a hot swap sata tray to my workstation at the office to help with virii scanning/disk repair. The tray works fine and I can access drives just fine, but it would be really great if I could also use the tray to mount a physical drive in a virtual machine to give me a layer of protection from infected drives.

I am somewhat familiar with MS Virtual Server 2005, and use it in a few client installations. I can successfully link the physical drive to a virtual drive, but VS does not allow linked drives to be mounted in a vm, so I cannot do what I want unless I clone the physical drive to a virtual drive, which will add lots of time to the process. I can't find any other way to access a physical drive, but maybe I'm missing something.

I've never used VMware's products, but wouldn't mind learning if they could do what I'm trying to accomplish. Do any of their free products do this? If so, which one?

Thanks for any input.
 
I don't understand what you are trying to do,

but you can select a physical disk in vmware to use instead of a virtual drive on a physcial disk.
 
Basically, I just want a vm to be able to access a physical drive for virus scans, ghosting, chkdsk, etc.

It would really be great if the vm would lock that drive so the host os can't access it. That way an infected drive couldn't infect the host os.
 
Ok I think I know what you are trying to do.

You want to be able to plug a hard drive in, that has a fully functional OS on it, and boot it up in a VM and be in working order like it was before you pulled it out of another computer.

No, to my knowledge you can't do that. I am an AVID user of VMware Workstation and I don't think you can plug the drive in and have it work.

I DO know there are some tools out there that will allow you to do that, but it converts the "contents" of the OS on that hard drive and modifies it slightly so you can use it in a VM. But that would require some amount of time to convert it into a VM... I'm pretty sure via VMWare through their ESX tools it will work.
 
I don't want to be able to boot the physical drive, just mount it as an additional drive in a safe environment that I can easily nuke if it gets infected.
 
There's an option to mount a hard disk, and you can select a physical disk. I've never actually used this but it is available in VMware Workstation.

physicaldisk.jpg
 
joblo37pam said:
I don't want to be able to boot the physical drive, just mount it as an additional drive in a safe environment that I can easily nuke if it gets infected.
Click to expand...

You'll still have to attach the drive to your physical machine before mounting it to the VM, so I don't know how safe this would be.
 
That's looking like what I want. Is that just available in workstation, or is it other products too?


I realize that the host os would still have exposure to the drive, but it would be limited. The real benefit of doing this would be to image the drives from a winPE environment without needing a separate physical machine. The av/chkdsk is secondary.
 
I can only speak on Workstation at this time. I've not used any other virtualization tools outside of VMware because it seems to have all the functionality I need. The license is like ~$200 or less. Worth every penny IMHO.
 
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