[Question]: Question about passing through an existing DSM disk with data

[MaJingyiFighting]

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Question

Hi,

Thank you for this project and the clear documentation.

I have a question about disks: is it possible to pass through a disk that already has DSM installed and contains data, and have virtual-dsm / vDSM recognize and reuse the existing volume instead of formatting it?

From what I understand, the recommended setup expects an empty disk and creates a new basic volume. Is this limitation because Virtual DSM itself does not provide a “migration” or “import existing disks” feature, or is it something specific to how virtual-dsm wires the disks to the VM?

My situation:

• I have a single 16 TB disk with about 16 TB of data on it.
• I don’t have another disk of the same size, so I can’t use Hyper Backup or a similar full-copy approach.
• I’d like to move to virtual-dsm while preserving the data, if at all possible.

Is there any safe way you would recommend to:

1. reuse this existing DSM disk directly in virtual-dsm, or
2. migrate the data to virtual-dsm without needing another 16 TB disk?

Any brief guidance or confirmation that this is (not) supported would be very helpful. Thank you for your time.

[kroese]

The normal DSM uses a different partition layout then Virtual DSM, so its not possible to use an existing disk unfortunately.