WS 8.0 on XP SP3 appears unable to access physical disks for data.
I recently updated VMware Workstation from 6.5 to 8.0
A VM that was previously able to access physical disks now fails to do so.
Trying to simplify the debug, I created a rev8.0 virtual machine, installing Ubuntu 11.04 to the virtual disk + applied updates. Boots successfully.
Added a physical disk to the VM configuration successfully. WS8 shows it as "Hard Disk (IDE)".
Unfortunately, booting the VM immediately fails with this error:
'Cannot open the disk "...\test.vmdk" or one of the snapshot disks it depends on:
Reason: The physical disk is already in use'
[I assume it means the physical disk described by test.vmdk, not the file test.vmdk itself].
I've attached a short selection from vmware.log
Do I need to set give VM 8.0 any special permissions to let it access the physical disk? I am an "admin" user when using (and when installing) WS.
Any suggestions? I tried enabling gather full debugging info, but the relevant section of the log wasn't significantly different.
It would be nice to see some indication in the log about what sort of error caused the open to fail (perhaps some Windows equivalent of errno?).
Notes:
Computer Management \ Disk Management shows that Disk1 is "Basic" and "Healthy (unknown parititon)".
[The partition is actually an ext3 filesys, which I plan to read from the VM]. Disk1 has no drive letters or path.
It is a 931GB SATA disk.
Host OS is Windows XP Home SP3
Workstation is 8.0.0 build-471780
I am NOT trying to boot from the physical disk, just use it for data storage.
Thanks for your help,
Dave H