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Mounting Virtual Disks Outside of
Virtual Machines
The VMware DiskMount Utility allows you to mount an unused virtual disk in a
Windows host file system as a separate drive without needing to connect to the
virtual disk from within a virtual machine. You can mount specific volumes of a virtual
disk if the virtual disk is partitioned.
DiskMount is a command line program called vmware-mount that works similarly
to how you use the subst command on Windows. Once the disk is mounted, you
can read from and write to the disk as if it were a separate file system with its own
drive letter on your network. However, you cannot power on any virtual machine that
uses this disk until the disk is unmounted.
You can perform activities such as scanning a virtual disk for viruses and transferring
files between the host system and a powered off virtual machine.
When you are finished using the mounted virtual disk, delete the mapping so the
virtual disk can be used by virtual machines again.
Considerations for Mounting Virtual Disks
• You can use DiskMount with virtual disks created with VMware ESX Server 2,
VMware GSX Server 3 and 2.5.1, VMware ACE, and VMware Workstation 5 and 4.
Note: Virtual disks created with VMware ACE cannot be encrypted virtual disks.
Encrypted virtual disks cannot be mounted with DiskMount.
• You can run DiskMount on any versions of Windows 2000, Windows XP, or
Windows Server 2003.
• You must mount virtual disks as drive D: or greater. You cannot specify a letter
already in use on the host.
• You can mount volumes formatted with FAT (12/16/32) or NTFS only. If the
virtual disk has a mix of partitions (volumes) where, for example, a partition is
unformatted or is formatted with a Linux operating system and another partition
is formatted with a Windows operating system, you can mount the Windows
partition with DiskMount.
• You can mount a virtual disk that has a snapshot. Any changes you make to the
virtual disk while it is mounted are discarded when you revert to the snapshot.
• You cannot mount a virtual disk if any of its .vmdk files are compressed or have
read-only permissions. Change these attributes before mounting the virtual disk.
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