Is there a problem with adding a second HDD?

[Guddler]

I'm trying to add a second, 30GB dynamically growing disk to my VM.

I have no problem with actually doing this and when the VM first powers up the second HDD icon in the bottom right is blue indicating it is connected. However, pretty much immediately it greys out and clicking on the "Hard Disk 2 settings" shows that it's disconnected.

Any ideas please? I've tried this with both IDE and SCSI and it makes no difference. I've been into the virtual machines bios and it shows both disks and in the .VMX file both are indicated as being connected. Bit stuck on what else to try!

As an aside, I'm only really doing this since performance of intensively accessing a shared volume appears to be woeful so I was just trying to see if the performance was any better with a "proper" virtual disk.

\[EDIT] Sorry, guest OS is Win XP Pro, host is OSX 10.4.10, product is beta 4.1

Message was edited by:

Guddler

[Hippotech]

I had this also in XP, but if you let XP start you should see the disk in disk manager. At least that's what happened to me.

Once formatted, it stayed blue.

Hippo

[Guddler]

DOH!!!

Many thanks.

Note to VMWare, okay, while not specifically a VMWare thing, or problem, poss. worth a quick note in the help system (which I did check) to mention that it will need initializing in disk manager before it will appear to be connected?

Thanks again.

[oregoncfo]

I strongly agree that this is something that needs to be disclosed upfront. I wasted a lot of time searching help communities and trying to troubleshoot why a drive that was added in the virtual machine and in Win XP was not visible or available. The situation that is described as a simple thing in the Fusion documentation is actually far from obvious even for a very experienced user of Win XP. After you add a new virtual hard disk drive as described in the Fusion help documentation (that part is very easy) you then have to access the Win XP Computer Management tool (which is not easy to find if you are not familiar with it). Then you must access the Disk Management option under the Storage submenu and there are 2 steps from there that are required. Come on VMWare, this needs to be easily available upfront in the documentation and on the help site. I am really disappointed by how poorly this is currently handled. Where can I get my 2 hours back?

[rcardona2k]

Why favor Windows? The same issue applies with different instructions for Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, insert the name of your pet OS here. May be a note in general to use the Format options in your OS to make the disk visible.

AFAIK, this has been common knowledge for decades.

[oregoncfo]

The reason to point this out is that Windows is the OS that 97% of the world uses and a very small % of those are as sophisticated as someone who still enjoys memorizing command line prompts in Solaris, Linux, etc. When you start marketing products to the masses you need to be explicit and document common things not rely on the "common knowledge" acquired by techie snobs who spend too many hours in a chair in a dark room looking at a computer screen and burning hours on Second Life.

[rcardona2k]

No offense taken and no offense meant but none of those comments applies to me. 97% of the OS X customer base doesn't run Windows, it's why we're on Macs! In fact there are a lot of new users on the OS X platform tilting the market balance of Windows. I would have to google the format command for Linux (I have a rough idea though). Never played Second Life or WoW and my house is brightly lit by power-saving track lighting.

It still doesn't change the fact that formatting a new drive is Common Knowledge, has been for decades, whether you spent 1 minute on it or two hours.

[Bob_Zimmerman]

Perhaps a better solution would be to do what the hard drive manufacturers have done.

You see, Windows has exactly this problem with an unformatted drive (or a drive with a filesystem it doesn't recognize) whether in a VM or on physical hardware. There's no filesystem to mount, so it doesn't get a drive letter. Years and years ago, drive manufacturers decided to format new drives. Normally they use FAT, but lately I'm seeing some very large drives come HFS+ formatted.

Perhaps Fusion should have a global preference to create FAT-formatted VMDKs by default with a radio button to allow the user to switch to unformatted? That would be the "best" way to handle it, since it would then "just work" from the perspective of the majority of users.

Would be a really cool feature to add, but it might require licensing a bunch of patents and so forth, which could make it prohibitively expensive.