Access a windows dynamic hard drive through a virtual machine on ubuntu?

Posted by Enigma on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Enigma
Published on 2012-10-23T22:25:19Z Indexed on 2012/10/23 23:03 UTC
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I have a Windows 7 OS and am thinking about transitioning to a dual boot set up with Ubuntu 12.04. From what I recall, it is not possible to natively access Dynamic Windows Partitions in a Linux OS.

My thought is that it might be possible to have a virtual machine (running windows) installed within Ubuntu access the physical dynamic drive.

The problem comes to whether VMWare can access the physical disk "high enough" to be able to mount it within the windows virtual machine as a native device or if it gets passed through from the native Linux OS.

This is really the only thing holding me back from switching to a dual-boot set up as the dynamic disk is made up of 4 or 5 hard drives and I would very much like access to the data on both OS's.

Alternatively, is there another solution for combining multiple physical hard drives into one virtual hard drive that would be readable on both OS's?

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