Can a VMware session running linux be made to see a removable hard drive

Yes, see my EE Article, and Tutorial Walkthrough, either present a USB disk to the VM

HOW TO: Add and Connect a USB Device to a Virtual Machine, hosted on VMware vSphere Hypervisor ESX 4.1 ESXi 4.1, ESXi 5.0

OR


HOW TO: Add Local Storage (e.g. a SATA disk) as a Raw Disk Mapping (RDM) or Mapped RAW LUN to a virtual machine hosted on ESXi

The removable drive I need access to from the VM is a sata encosure. These aritcles show how to add a USB device. In the Vshpere it gives me the option to add hard disk but then I have to browse to or create a new VMDK file. I just want the drive to show up as there or in windows it might be called a network drive. I don't want to create a new VMware session on it as that will defeat the purpose of being able to save data and take it offsite to that removable drive.

if the drive is not USB (1st EE Article), the only other option, is the 2nd EE Article adding a RAW Device.

This putty program doesn't seem to want to connect to my VMware device. And the GUI parts the option to add Raw Device mappings is greyed out.

You may need to enable SSH

see here

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1017910

How about this, is there any way of getting the VM session to see a USB drive? I see an option for adding a USB controller but that didn't appear to do anything.

Yes, follow my EE Article.

After adding USB Controller, you add the USB device (when the USB external hard drive is attached to the host)

Thanks that worked, however and this may be a linux problem with the guest OS. I copied some data to the usb drive as a test and then removed the drive then the guest OS rebooted. When it came back on I put the USB drive back in and it shows up as degraded.