Vista - I thought virtual machines were separate from the host?

Why does Windows Mail in Vista want to import all my identities from OE on
the Host machine? Why does Windows Mail in Vista even see, or anyway know,
that there is an XP Host machine that has OE on it? It seems to me that the
Vista machine should not be aware of OE on the host machine.

Melelina wrote:
Here are my guesses:

- When creating the new virtual machine, you elected to create a virtual
hard disk that was "Linked to a hard disk" so you brought your host's
disk(s) into the virtual machine.

- You have the VM Additions installed (most users do once they find out
about them) and elected to share a folder (which has the OE files in it
or in a subfolder).

- The import wizard appears when start Vista's Mail program. That
doesn't mean it found anything but simply started up to have you point
at where is the message store for OE. You saw the wizard start up but
killed it before it figured out there was nothing to find. Wanting to
import old identities is not the same as actually importing that old
data. Did it actually find an old OE message store?

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:58:23 -0600, VanguardLH <V@xxxxxx> wrote:
The Vista machine isn't aware of the VM. The OE identities aren't
shared via the network.
This one's out because you can no longer mount a linked disk to a VM.
You can create a linked disk, but you can't use it.
--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

Steve Jain [MVP] wrote:
In the Help included in VPC2007, for the article titled "Create a
virtual hard disk as a link to a host hard disk", it says:

....
8. In the Physical Hard Disk dialog box, click the appropriate disk in
the Host Physical Disk box, click Next, and then click Finish.

If the physical disk that you select is not mounted, you can create a
link with read/write access by clearing the Read only check box.
....

I haven't ever bothered to use this feature. I find networked shares or
the Shared Folder option of VM Additions sufficient to get files between
the guest's virtual drive and the host's real drive. It isn't clear
from this help whether it is to a hard disk that you are linking (i.e.,
a physical hard disk with all its partitions, if any) or to a "drive"
(which is a partition on a hard disk to which an OS has assigned a drive
letter). Too often disk and drive are used interchangeably and without
sufficient context to know if it's the whole physical disk or just a
drive letter assigned by some OS to a partition on the physical disk.

Using a linked disk doesn't not obviate the requirement to have a
virtual disk within the guest. That is, you still need the virtual disk
in the virtual machine, and adding a linked disk inside the VM is
something additional. While the help says that you cannot link to a
dynamic drive on the host, it does say you can link to a "disk" (whether
that's a physical disk or just a partition on it is unclear) to a basic
drive.

So if some update to VPC2007 made linked "disks" unusable, are you
saying its help is now out of sync with its features?

My understanding is the you CAN link to a disk and that it is the ENTIRE
physical disk to which you link *but* that physical disk cannot be
represented in the host OS (i.e., there are no partitions on that hard
disk for which drive letters are assigned by the host OS). So a hard
disk for whose partitions have no drive letters in the host OS can be
used in the virtual machine as a linked disk. You are adding a disk
that retains its files even if you close the virtual machine with
changes being deleted, but that hard disk can't be used by the host OS.

I believe the following is in VPC's help (someone else said it was):

"Links to physical hard disks with mounted volumes are read only.
Some operating systems are incompatible with read-only disks. You can
address this problem by creating a differencing disk to the read-only
disk."

Actually a partition not used by the host OS would also suffice. I've
read where one user uses these unused partitions on which to install his
guest OS. Rather than use a file in the OS for the host, they use a
partition that is not available to the host.

What the help under the article titled "Createing virtual hard disks"
also says "All volumes on the physical hard disk must be unmounted by
the host operating system in order to write to the disk." Well,
unmounted on the host OS doesn't mean it cannot be used by the guest OS.
So the volume on the hard disk must not be mounted by the host OS when
you load the VM that links to that volume. Okay, but that doesn't stop
you from mounting it after you exit that VM to get at the files on
there.

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:55:55 -0600, VanguardLH <V@xxxxxx> wrote:
Not in VPC 2007 SP1. Check the readme ("Support has been removed for
the use of linked disks in a virtual machine.") or try it. You can no
longer mount a linked disk.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

Steve Jain [MVP] wrote:
Guess it was a "leakage" for malware (or inexperienced users) that they
wanted to avoid.

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:15:19 -0600, VanguardLH <V@xxxxxx> wrote:

Maybe, but then they should have removed it completely from VPC. You
can still create linked disks with the Disk Wizard, but you can't use
them. Strange!?!

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

Steve Jain [MVP] wrote:
Functional developers not sychronizing with UI developers, I guess.
Amazing how many software houses don't have weekly code reviews anymore.

"Steve Jain [MVP]" <noreply.-@-.essjae.com> wrote in message
news:d0van4da6qs7e78c18lvd02tqp4nglk15b@xxxxxxI think it remained there for physical-to-virtual migration. I see I can use
the Virtual Disk Wizard to convert the linked VHD to a dinamically expanding
or fixed size VHD.

About the "whole physical disk" versus "a partition on a disk": it looks the
link is to the whole disk (using VPC2007-SP1), that's what the wizard
presented for selection.

"VanguardLH" <V@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:gl47jc$394$1@xxxxxx
More amazing that QA (or the documentation writers) didn't catch this. The
QA where I work would have found this in the first 5 minutes of testing.