Determining which drives and volumes match which disks in a Windows virtual machine

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

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.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5

Resolution

To identify which drives/volumes correspond to which disks:

1. Open the virtual machine console.
2. Click Start > Run, Type compmgmt.msc and click ok.
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 9 to determine the disk and the corresponding drive.

NOTE: This is not applicable for windows 10, windows 2012 and above version please do connect with Microsoft. 

 

Workaround:
Use a PowerShell script to perform the identification.