The Wahyudiharto's Blog

Until the latest version of VirtualBox (1.4.1) released for Mac, there are still no support for the Host Interface networking option enabled yet. Moreover, you even could not see the NIC card got working on Mac OSX running in some Intel Machine (Jas 10.4.8) since it didn’t recognized properly with the built-in driver. So, is there anyway to get a simple networking between both OS? Sure it does.

FYI, file transfer in a Shared Folders option allow you to access files of your Mac OSX system from within the Windows XP guest system, much like ordinary shares on Windows networks would – except that shared folders do not need a networking setup. Sharing is accomplished using a special service on the host and a file system driver for the guest, both of which are – fortunately - provided by VirtualBox. In order to use this feature, the VirtualBox Guest Additions have to be installed in guest OS. Currently, Shared Folders are limited to Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Linux 2.4 and 2.6 guests. To share a folder with a virtual machine in VirtualBox, you must specify the path of the folder to be shared on the host and chose a “share name” that the guest can use to access it.



Then, you can mount the shared folder from inside a VM the same way as you would mount an ordinary network share.
In Windows XP guest, use the following formula command:

net use x: \\vboxsvr\sharename

While vboxsvr is a fixed name, replace “x:“ with the drive letter that you want to use for the share, and sharename with the share name specified before.

To simplify this, I used to create a batch file which can executed manually to mount all of the 4 shared folder name (1 NTFS partition for Windows XP, 2 FAT32 partition for data & 1 HFS Mac OSX partition) specified before after the guest OS shows up. For example, named it with vboxsvr.bat and the picture below is the values:



You can also create a link for the batch file & move it to on a someplace you like for example in a quick launch panel.



To test the script, simply click the shortcut file until it processed completely. If it succeeded, the script will create new networking drives available assigned next to the drive letter defined before on the batch file.



However, I still don’t understand why it marked with Disconnected Network Drive label although files & folders on both OS is accessible as you may seen on ordinary full permission shared drives.

Labels: VirtualBox

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