This mechanism is used to prevent users from accidentally trying to run the host operating system again as a guest or another guest operating system that the virtual machine was not configured for. The description file also prevents accidental writes to raw disk partitions from badly behaved operating systems or applications. The Workstation Configuration Wizard is used to configure Workstation to use existing raw disk partitions. The wizard steps the user though creating a configuration for a new virtual machine including configuring the raw disk description files. The wizard is typically rerun to create a separate configuration for each guest operating system installed on a raw partition.
Workstation works with existing boot managers installed on the computer system.
The boot manager will run inside Workstation and present the user with the choice of guest operating systems to run. The user has to manually choose the guest operating system that this configuration was intended to run. To configure a virtual machine to run from a raw disk partition, select Existing Partition in the Workstation Configuration Wizard. Most partitions should be set to Read Only, and the partition that the virtual machine is to run in should be set to Read Write. To run multiple guest operating systems from different raw disk partitions, first unmap these partitions in the host.