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Background: Host OS is Windows Vista. Guest OS is Ubuntu

VMWare can give direct access to a guest OS to a physical disk partition, so say my disk has two partitions, the first is NTFS and has windows on it, and the second is EXT3, obviously not readable from windows. I can then run VMWare, and give Ubuntu access to that second partition, and he can mount it and access all the data and so on.

However, I just converted my disk in windows into a 'Dynamic Disk'...and now VMWare can't see the individual partitions. Instead it just sees a single partition the size of the entire disk.

Is there any way to give the ext3 partition, which is now inside a windows dynamic disk, to the vmware instance? I know of LDM, but that only works when linux has full access to the entire disk, and I just want to give it access to a single partition.

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You could just copy the partition into a VMDK file based partition and store it inside the dynamic disk. The difference in performance is negligable when you use a fixed size rather than a growing one.

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  • Yeah, I think I'm going to do something like this, thanks for the tip.
    – davr
    Oct 5, 2009 at 17:07
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Dynamic disks are only understood and supported by Windows systems, nobody else can make use of them.

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_disk_dynamic_win2kxp_do_not_use.html

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  • Darn...that ruins my whole plan...thanks for the link. Hopefully someone else chimes in with a workaround. PS: Dynamic disks can be read by Linux systems, see my LDM link above, so not completely windows only.
    – davr
    Oct 4, 2009 at 22:30

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