Setting a disk to offline in order to make physical disk access work in [Windows 7] on [VMware]

I installed VMware workstation on my Windows 7 machine, then I tried to install a linux distribution to a physical disk. It turns out VMware errors stating it is unable to sync disk. So after a little research on the net I found out that Windows 7/Vista have new security policies which prevented physical disk access to programs if the disks are online. So to set a disk offline, use diskpart, and type the following commands in diskpart list disk select disk <your desired offline disk number> offline disk attribute disk clear readonly rescan