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Month: January 2015

VMWare Workstation Feature Request: Better Raw Disk Access

I’ve made the following feature request to VMWare to improve the handling of raw disks under virtual machines in their Workstation product and was wondering if anybody else felt it’ll be handy for them:

Practically everytime I start a VMWare Workstation VM on Windows7 which uses a raw disk partition/physical disk, I receive the “Partition table changed” message and have to manually reset the hard disks for the VM. Can I therefore request a feature which will prevent this from happening (or, at the very least, make it easier to sort out).

Ideally, I’d like the VM to use the drive’s UUID to identify the physical drive instead of using “PhysicalDriveX” – this means that it shouldn’t matter if they drive is read by Windows reads the physical drives in a different order, the same drive will be found.

When adding a physical disk, could the drop down be modified to provide useful information – so instead of just:
Device:
* PhysicalDrive0
* PhysicalDrive1
etc
it is:
* PhysicalDrive0 – CRUCIAL M4-CT256M4SSD2
* PhysicalDrive1 – HITACHI HTS727575A9E364
(so make and model of the drive)
or at the very least the drive size or the partition count:
* PhysicalDrive0 – 689.64Gb (3 partitions)
* PhyiscalDrive1 – 238.47Gb (5 partitions)

This will make it easier to spot which drive and partition I’m after instead of manually selecting each drive to see which partition I need to reattach the 2 drives needed for my VM.

Finally, if there was a way of reordering the drives in VMWare Workstation, it’ll be appreciated (in case of reattaching the drives in the wrong order).