Sunday 22 November 2020

Getting Hyper-V to recognise a physical disk

 I'm running WSL2 and docker on my main machine and have noticed that even though Virtual Box will run, the reliability of the VMs is somewhat sub-par and often involves crashing.

I have taken to installing various Linux distros such as Ubuntu and Parrot on SSD drives in removable USB3 housings.

The main issue with installing Linux from USB boot media is the installation interferes with the Windows UEFI boot loader and can leave Windows unbootable without repairing this. However, if you do fix the Windows boot loader it stop Linux booting. There is probably a way to fix this but I haven't spent the time to do so yet.

My workaround has been to use Hyper-V to install Linux to a the removeable drive, however Hyper-V has an issue seeing the drive to add sometimes.

I found the answer here.

By following the proceedure at the bottom of the post, Hyper-V is able to see and add an SSD drive in a USB3 enclosure. This is limited to disks though, removable devices won't work in my experience.

Thanks to reid1000 you can follow the steps below:

  1. In Disk Management, offline the disk
  2. Right-click the disk and go to Properties > Policies tab
  3. Select the option "Better performance" then click OK. If prompted to restart your computer, click No.
  4. Again right-click the disk, go to Properties > Policies tab
  5. Select the option "Quick removal (default)" then click OK. If prompted to restart your computer, click No.
  6. In Hyper-V Manager, turn off the virtual machine. Then, open its settings and add the physical hard disk to the SCSI Controller.