[AccessD] windows vm

Does anyone know if the Windows VM stuff allows the vm to access disk drives on the host machine?

I use Windows Home Server, which runs over the top of Windows 2003.  I have been using it 
successfully for well over a year, however it seems I overclocked my cpu some time back and managed 
to damage the OS - it started rebooting on me.  By the time I discovered the problem I had to do a 
reinstall.

I run MyMovies which is a third party add-in for Windows Media Center.  It uses a SQL Server 2005 
express database (very small, about 10 mbytes), which I had running on the WHS server.  Now of 
course I have to rebuild that as well as other software I had installed for the purpose of ripping 
my dvds to hard disk etc.

Since I have to reinstall, it occurred to me that if I placed that in a VM (and it will run in a vm) 
then I can place the vm out in another drive and if the time ever comes to move the database, it 
will be in a vm and be easily portable.

I tried to use VMWare.  While it does allow me to map a physical drive to the vm and see it from 
inside the vm, for some reason it does not see all of the directories of the host's drive and even 
those that it can see it cannot manipulate correctly.  Maaaaaybe it has to do with the drive being 
1.5 gb, not sure.  At any rate, the software running in the vm needs to be able to read (rip) dvds 
and store them on a physical drive on the host machine.

I am trying to get Microsoft's VM stuff set up but I know nothing about it and before I get too 
deeply into this and discover it does not do this, I thought I'd ask.

So, can the VM see, read and write to a host drive or partition, which is still visible to the host, 
i.e. either writing to the disk will not cause corruption.  In fact the Windows Media Center does 
not write to the movies stuff but it does write to music files IIRC and so I do not want any chance 
of corrupting stuff.

Anyone?

-- 
John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com