You can use physical disks if you want Workstation to run one or more guest operating systems from existing disk partitions. A physical disk directly accesses an existing local disk or partition.
The most common use of a physical disk is for converting a dual-boot or multiple-boot machine so one or more of the existing operating systems can be run inside a virtual machine. For details, see the VMware technical note
Dual-Boot Computers and Virtual Machines.
Before you add a physical (sometimes called raw) disk to your virtual machine, power off the virtual machine. Physical disks can be set up on both IDE and SCSI devices. At this time, however, booting from an operating system already set up on an existing SCSI disk or partition is not supported.
After you create a physical disk using one or more partitions on a physical disk, you should never modify the partition tables by running
fdisk or a similar utility in the guest operating system.
If you use fdisk or a similar utility on the host operating system to modify the partition table of the physical disk, you must re-create the virtual machine’s physical disk. All files that were on the physical disk are lost when you modify the partition table.
Click Advanced if you want to specify the virtual machine SCSI or IDE device node to which this disk is connected, or to select a disk mode. For more information, see
Advanced Hard Disk Settings Dialog Box.
