Windows – clean way to obtain exclusive access to a physical partition under Windows

hard drivepartitioningwindows 7

I'm trying, under Windows 7, to run a virtual machine with VMWare Player from an OS installed on a physical partition. However, when I boot the virtual machine, VMWare Player says that it couldn't access the physical drive for writing.

This seems to be a generally acknowledged problem in the VMWare community, as Windows Vista introduced a compelling new security feature that makes it impossible to write to a raw drive without obtaining exclusive access to it first.

I have googled the issue and found a few workarounds. However, the clean ones seem to only work on whole physical disks, and not on partitions.

So I would be left with the dirty solution. In short, it meddles with the MBR to erase any trace of the partitions to use, makes Windows forget about them, then restores the MBR so we can launch the VM.

I'm not sure I want to do that. Is there a way to let VMWare acquire exclusive access to the partition without requiring me to nuke it away? What I'd be looking for, I suppose, is a way to put just partitions offline instead of whole physical drives.

More infos related to the bounty.

I have a dual-boot setup: Mac OS is my primary operating system, and I have Windows installed too. As much as I can run Windows in a virtual machine if I don't want to reboot, I'd like to be able to run Mac OS in a virtual machine when I'm under Windows.

My goal is to run my main Mac OS partition from VMWare under Windows, just like I run Windows from VMWare Fusion. (Since this is my main OS, I don't plan on patching the kernel or whatever to get it working in a virtual machine.) I created the virtual machine from VMWare Fusion (as it has the "Mac OS X Server" VM type) then moved it to Windows and modified it from VMWare Player. Seems to almost-work, as the OS gets to the loading screen and then the VM dies because it can't access \\.\PhysicalDrive0.

Virtual Box fails even harder, as it starts Mac OS in verbose mode and crashes very quickly (but seems to be able to access the partition), so I think it would be easier to get VMWare access my partition than to get Virtual Box to run it.

On the legal side, I'd be running one copy of Mac OS X on one Apple-labelled machine, so I'm okay.

Best Answer

I have come across only one possible solution, using the free virtual disk driver imdisk together with devio (remote drive access and acquisition). As imdisk is a kernel driver, it might be able to write to the partition. Unfortunately, as devio works in user-mode, I am not too sure whether this approach will work for you.

devio can acquire a physical partition and publish it on the network. For example:

devio -r 9000 \\.\PhysicalDrive0 2

does publish from the first disk the second partition on TCP port 9000, and will wait for a connection on this port. Better disable the firewall while testing this, and run devio as administrator.

To define this published partition as a new and stand-alone hard disk, use :

imdisk -a -t proxy -o ip -f 127.0.0.1 -m R:

which using localhost will create a new hard disk called R which is not a partition of anything. You can now try whether you can use the pretend real hard disk R in a VMware virtual machine.

This approach is explained in detail in Devio: Remote drive access and acquisition.

If this doesn't work, you will either have to :

  1. Accept a dangerous solution that modifies the MBR.
  2. Abandon using MacOS within Win7 as VM, using files in the Mac partition through Windows applications (with end-of-line character problems).
  3. Use a Virtual File System product, such as ELDOS Callback File System, although I doubt that this problem is worth for you a few thousand dollars.
  4. Abandon Windows 7 and downgrade to XP.
  5. Modify the source of imdisk so that as a kernel driver it will create a pretend disk directly on the physical partition, without the need for devio.
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