Originally Posted By: pedrohoon
Originally Posted By: Shonky

Be aware that direct disk access in a number of VM programs (VMware, whatever MS VM is called and a couple of others that I can't remember) is (at best) difficult to use particularly when you get to drives over 1TB.



Thanks for the heads-up on that Shonky.

By direct disk access do you mean like a block copy? I was hoping that if I run into the situation where I need to pull a drive out of the NAS, I could use something like Ubuntu under Parallels on the Mac (with the disk connected in a dock via USB) and simply mount the disk and copy files off it, or if necessary I have an older WinXP desktop I can connect the drive to internally via SATA and dual boot into Ubuntu.


If you create a filesystem on a partition on the disc, you will need to give the VM direct access to the disk so it can see and mount that filesystem. The recommended method for disks in a VM these days is to create a disk image file on a partition mounted in the host system. Direct disk access seems to have largely fallen out of favour. If ext3 there are some Windows drivers I've seen but when I've tried to use them they are not the most reliable so I've resorted to a live CD (as mentioned below).

Originally Posted By: andy
He means mounting the real physical disk into Linux running in a vm, as opposed to mounting a virtual disc image like you typically do with a vm. You'd probably find that task a lot easier under a live CD booted on the PC than under VMWare on the Mac.


Yep. And what you're suggesting Andy would work just fine and would be easier for a one off occasion where you're basically trying to recover from a failure. Surely there are live CDs that would boot on a Mac these days?
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Christian
#40104192 120Gb (no longer in my E36 M3, won't fit the E46 M3)