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Determining which drives/volumes match which disks in a Windows virtual machine (2021947)

Purpose

If you have multiple disks attached to a virtual machine, it can be difficult to determine how they correspond to the drives in the guest operating system. This can be useful if you need to remove a particular drive (C:, D:, etc) from a virtual machine.

This article provides the steps to identity these relationships.

Resolution

To identify which drives/volumes correspond to which disks:

  1. Open the console of the virtual machine.
  2. Click Start > Run, type compmgmt.msc, and press Enter.
  3. Click Device Manager.
  4. Expand Disk drives.
  5. Right-click a disk and click Properties.
  6. Click the Volumes tab, then click the Populate button.
  7. Make note of the Disk ID (eg. Disk 2), Location and Volume (eg. C:).
    Note: Within Windows, the Bus ID will always be displayed as zero. The only way to differentiate between different SCSI controllers is to use the 'Location' value. This will be unique for each SCSI controller.
  8. Repeat steps 5 to 7 for each disk.
  9. In vCenter Server, right-click the virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
  10. Click a disk, and look at SCSI (X:Y) Hard Disk under Virtual Device Node. The X:Y values are:

    • X = Location ID
    • Y = Disk ID

    Match the Disk ID with the Disk ID found in Step 7 to determine the disk and the corresponding to drive.

Update History

10/05/2012 - Further clarified how to match Disk IDs in Step 10

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