How to prevent initialisation of volumes on the vRanger machine, when used in Lan-Free and Hot-Add (4047329)

When running Lan-free or Hot-Add backup jobs, it is important to ensure that the mounted volumes do not get initialised on the vRanger machine.

Disable automount on the vRanger machine. This will prevent Windows on the vRanger VM from assigning a drive letter to the target VMDK.

Some of the error codes we can see when performing backups using these transport methods are the following:

• KB 90590: One or more disks from virtual machine is already mounted.
• KB 176396: Error: 2760 - [vix_cant_open_detail] VIX can't open [Datastore] VMname/VMname.vmdk (You do not have access rights to this file).

To disable automount:

1. Open CMD as an Administrator and type: diskpart
2. Run this command to disable automatic drive letter assignment: automount disable 
3. Run this command to clean any registry entries pertaining to previously mounted volumes: automount scrub
4. Then exit by typing: exit