Add physical disk to a VM

[jakelundy]

Is there a way to add a physical disk (not a zvol) to a virtual machine?

My server has physical disk partitions that FreeNAS doesn't support. I'd like to mount these partitions in a Linux VM, so I can copy files off it.

 

[kdragon75]

So you want to import data from a disk from another system? What file system are you trying to import? You could also clone the physical disk to a zvol and gain all the zfs goodness and resilience while keeping the "disk" as is.

Please provide as much information around all of this that you can. Perhaps we will be better able to help you.

 

[jakelundy]

I'm trying to revive some data from an old Windows machine where I had some partitions with a TrueCrypt filesystem. Right now I have a FreeNAS environment on that machine with some disks with ZFS partitions shared via FreeNAS, and other TrueCrypt formatted disks. I'd like to slowly move the data from the TrueCrypt partitions to ZFS.

I was able to mount the TrueCrypt partitions in a Linux Mint live cd environment with ZuluCrypt. I don't know how to mount a TrueCrypt filesystem natively in FreeNAS which is why I was going down the path of running a Linux Mint VM in FreeNAS.

I could continue what I've been doing, which is to boot into Linux Mint when I want to access the TrueCrypt partitions, but the VM-in-FreeNAS approach would let me keep sharing the ZFS partitions in my network while I take my time going through the data in the TrueCrypt partitions and deciding what I want to do with them. Note that I don't need FreeNAS to share the data in the TrueCrypt partitions, but just to mount it.

I didn't think of cloning the raw disk into a zvol. (Very clever!) I could try that, but don't have enough free space in my zpools for the ~3TB of data in each of the TrueCrypt partitions.

Hope that helps give some more context to my question.