passthru hdd question

shuhdonk

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Dec 15, 2020
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I passed through a few hdd's to a Windows 10 vm I have running. I opened disk manager and it recognized the drives and popped up to initialize them. I formatted them NTFS, all is working fine. My question is if I were to remove the hard drives from the system and put them into a standalone Windows machine will I be able to access all the data normally?
 
Probably, if you attached the drives directly to the vm like you said they will be regular Windows drives without any modification from Proxmox. The only issue you'll have to worry about are the permissions when placing the disks in a standalone Windows machine. But haven't done it myself so can't say for sure that it will be an issue.
 
Also depends on how you passthrough the disks. With PCI passthrough of the HBA it would be exactly the same as using the HDDs on a bare metal windows on that server, because that way the VM got direct and physical access to the real drives. If you just used "qm set" to passthrough the disks into your WinVM, your WinVM is still only working with virtual disks and not with the real hardware and this might cause problems. I for example got some "qm set" passthroughed disks where everything is fine inside the VM (disk is partitioned and formated) but on the host fdisk -l can't see any partitions.
 
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Also depends on how you passthrough the disks. With PCI passthrough of the HBA it would be exactly the same as using the HDDs on a bare metal windows on that server, because that way the VM got direct and physical access to the real drives. If you just used "qm set" to passthrough the disks into your WinVM, your WinVM is still only working with virtual disks and not with the real hardware and this might cause problems. I for example got some "qm set" passthroughed disks where everything is fine inside the VM (disk is partitioned and formated) but on the host fdisk -l can't see any partitions.
They were passthrough via qm set. So if I were to setup a new windows vm in another system (via Proxmox) could I then pass these drives through to that vm and have the file system intact and accessible? I am wondering as I am using these drives to back up data and if I needed to get access to these drives if the proxmox server were to fail in some way would I be able to easily do that. Thanks again.
 
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