I'm practicing various backup and recovery operations with virtual machines in VMware workstation 9.
My guest machine is Windows 2008 Server (SP2)
I backed up this virtual machine to an external hard drive - this was a full server backup meant for a later bare metal restore. So I deleted the virtual machine completely and then recreated it as it would exist just before installation of the OS. When I boot from the W2K8 .iso image (stored on the hard drive of the host machine), I select the repair option and attempt to perform a bare metal restore from the external hard drive (USB connected). If I connect the ExtHD after selecting the repair option and let Windows scan for disks (for a valid backup file) it scans and scans and scans... but never finds the external hard drive. If I connect the ExtHD before booting from the .iso image, the boot process stops (freezes) - and continues if I disconnect the ExtHD. If I reconnect... freeze. And yes, I am sure that the ExtHD is indeed connected to the virtual machine (and not the host machine). There is the little icon in the lower right hand corner that can be right-clicked to connect to or disconnect from the virtual machine (and thus connect/disconnect to/from the host machine). ****** Do I need to load a driver? If so, which one? And how would I load it? If it's on external media and the media cannot be detected... well, that's not going to work. I also notice that even when an OS is installed, the virtual machine (unlike the host) cannot use the USB 3.0 ports of the host. Are special drivers required? Host machine is a Lenovo laptop (W5xx workstation series).