How can I make a local disk visible to a Windows XP VMWare image?

Question

How to make a local disk visible to a Windows XP VMWare image?

Preferably, I would like to make local disks available as drive letters in the VM Ware Image.

Answer 1

If both OSs are windows:

vm > settings > options > shared folders 

This way you can map the drive in the virtual machine as a folder on the host. :)

Answer 2

Use samba (linux host) or sharing (Windows host), and then map them as network drives in a virtual machine.

Answer 3

If you really want to make the disk visible (for example, use gparted, etc.), and not just copy some files:

You can create a pseudo-vmdk, which will actually be a link to an existing physical disk (or one or more of its partitions). This command, for example,

 VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename mydrive.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive0 

This displays the first physical disk as a whole. You should run this as root / admin (for win7, run cmd.exe as admin and cd in the directory where you have vmware)

(only for displaying sections 3.4: - sections 3.4)

Then map vmdk to drive in vm and presto!

Answer 4

vm> settings> options> shared folders> On this tab, you can choose how it will work. Even the display!