As classic would say: ZOMG11111

I came to a pretty nice and simple idea how to access my still-under-preparation ZFS storage from Windows.

It involved running FreeBSD 7.0 (or any other OS of your heart capable of accessing ZFS) in Microsoft Virtual PC, with a virtual hard disk linked to a physical hard disk and samba to talk whit microsoft :)

So nice and simple -- one would even think it would work... but... but...

Virtual hard disk linked to a physical hard disk was really cool feature back in MS VPC 2004 -- one could simply map physical hard drive to virtual machine and it would work! But not in MS VPC 2007, not anymore!

I've just tried to map my external USB drive to my virtual FreeBSD box... created virtual disk trough wizard... everything worked fine till now when this nice error appeared , when I've tried to assign virtual drive to virtual machine.

After some googling I've ended up reading release notes for MSVPC 2007:.

No support for using a virtual hard disk linked to a physical hard disk
You can create a virtual hard disk that is linked to a physical hard disk by using Virtual PC. However, it is no longer possible to use a virtual hard disk that is linked to a physical hard disk in a virtual machine. A virtual hard disk linked to a physical hard disk allows the guest operating system to directly modify the contents of a linked physical hard disk. This means that the guest operating system can overwrite the contents of the physical hard disk and potentially corrupt the host operating system and other programs and data of the physical hard disk.

O-k than... devolution is sure nice thing, but why the hell they won't remove option to create virtual disk linked to physical disks in the wizard?? Or at least some clarification in that error message would help... something like: 'there is no such thing as virtual drives mapped to physical drives in this version, go play somewhere else'.

Microsoft just proved their new strategies:
advertisers, advertisers, advertisers,... :(.
Where are those times Steve Ballmer was shouting for developers??

Lost hopes...