VMware : how to forward all errors to guest operating system

Question

I'm trying to run SpinRite on a VMware machine. Everything is going well, but as the drive fails VMware always pops up a warning saying:

Operation on file "\\.\PhysicalDrive0" failed.  
If the drive (...)  
Choose Continue to forward the error to the guest operating system.

And if I choose continue, as expected, it runs along ok. The problem is that I have to choose continue on every single disk error. This would mean hundreds of thousands of clicks and is not viable at all.

Has anyone had this problem? How did you solve it?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I am not sure that this is going to work or do what you actually want.

For example, I have run hard drive recovery utilities within a virtual machine - with success, but by using a USB caddy.

By using a caddy or similar, every raw command to the device is sent (Failure or success). as far as VMWare Workstation is concerned, it is just a USB device and nothing else.

However, if you are actually sharing a hard drive, as a hard drive, it is emulating/passing through the instructions - so, when it detects something is wrong or any failure, it pauses the command and gives you that prompt. When you click ok, it is most likely doing that same command again and reporting success - therefore, I doubt running spinrite will actually do any good in your current setup.

To explain again - lets say you have a mechanical failure, half the time a command to an area of the hard drive may fail. So, you run Spinrite, as expected you hit one of the errors but you get a prompt - when you click ok, it repeats that instruction, but this time it succeeds - as far as Spinrite is concerned, it only has seen a success and not that failure as the virtual machine suppressed the problem.

Also - if you like it then I won't argue, but I have tried a few times and not been impressed with Spinrite / it has never lived up to the hype for me.