Cannot assign physical hard drive to VM

[soho1]

I created a Win 7 VM using Hyper V (not an expert) and it seems to work just fine except that I cannot get it to see the host physical drive. The VHDX is fine, the CD is fine, but the in the VM settings, the Physical hard disk setting is greyed out. Iwant to share files between the host and the VM, What am I missing?

 

[Alejandro85]

The screenshots hints a possible cause, the disk must be offline. That is, it must not have been assigned any letter to any partition on the host system, so that the VM can take over it.

Is mounting the whole HD really needed? If you need to share files, you could use some other, more normal way to share them, like using standard Windows shares on those files, or mounting a FTP or SSH server, for example, just as if they were separate physical machines.

 

[Kari]

The screenshots hints a possible cause, the disk must be offline. That is, it must not have been assigned any letter to any partition on the host system, so that the VM can take over it.

Exactly. Using Disk Management on host you have to unmount / make offline every host disk you want to use on a vm. Of course you cannot make the host system disk offline, making it impossible to use it on vm.

Is mounting the whole HD really needed? If you need to share files, you could use some other, more normal way to share them, like using standard Windows shares on those files, or mounting a FTP or SSH server, for example, just as if they were separate physical machines.

Repeating myself but again: Exactly!

Another option: Your vm seems to run Windows 7 Pro, why don't you connect to it using Remote Desktop Connection? Simply run the vm, allow remote connections to it, close the Virtual Machine Connection (the vm) window and connect to it from host using remote desktop.

Remote Desktop tutorial at Seven Forums: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/3922-remote-desktop-connection-rdc-network.html

A bit more in-depth Remote Desktop connection tutorial on our sister site the Ten Forums, applies to Windows 7, 8, 8.1 & 10 (step 3.6 shows how to give the vm / remote computer access to your host drives): RDC - Connect Remotely to your Windows 10 PC - Windows 10 Forums

Kari