Adding Physical HDD ESXi

I've got an inst开发者_运维问答all of ESXi 4.1 running on my server, I also have a external network HDD that stores all my music/images etc, I've tried adding the HDD to the server, the disk is recognized by ESXi/VSphere, but its telling me I have to format the disk in order to use it.

Is this correct? I what to be able to add this HDD to an existing VM as a 2nd HDD, so then I can map the drive and share it on my network. Is this possible without wiping?

Thanks, james.

Where is the message comming from the VM guest operating system or ESXi?

What guest operating system are you using?

You should not need to format the hard disk to work in a guest VM if it has already been formatted with NTFS or FAT32 etc..

ESXi 4.1 supports pass-through for USB devices. Please check http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/documentLinkInt.do?externalId=1022290 and http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/documentLinkInt.do?externalID=1021345 for support details on USB devices.