Hey guys,

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.