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Installing an Operating System onto a Raw Partition from a Virtual Machine
Installing an Operating System onto a Raw Partition from a Virtual Machine
In some situations, you may want to install a guest operating system directly on a physical disk or partitionknown as a raw diskeven if you do not need to boot that disk on the host, outside of the virtual machine.
It is possible to use either an unused partition or a completely unused disk on the host as a disk in the virtual machine. However, it is important to be aware that an operating system installed in this setting probably cannot boot outside of the virtual machine, even though the data is available to the host.
Caution: Raw disks are an advanced feature and should be configured only by expert users.
VMware Workstation uses description files to control access to each raw disk on the system. These description files contain access privilege information that controls a virtual machine's access to certain partitions on the disks. This mechanism prevents users from accidentally running the host operating system again as a guest or running a guest operating system that the virtual machine is not configured to use. The description file also prevents accidental writes to raw disk partitions from badly behaved operating systems or applications.
Use the New Virtual Machine Wizard to configure VMware Workstation to use existing raw disk partitions. The wizard guides you though creating a new virtual machine including configuring the raw disk description files. Rerun the wizard to create a separate configuration for each guest operating system installed on a raw partition.