Shared Folder Drive Letter Assignment in V6 (again)

[Old Newbie]

Followed the discussions regarding the assignment of drive letters to network shares. If I have understood correctly, VB does not assign drive letters to shared folders, the Windows Guest makes those assignments.

Well, something changed! Just upgraded from 5.2.26 to 6.0.4. I have a several guest machines running Win XP, Win 7, Win 8 and Win 10. All use the same Shared Folder and the Auto Mount option is checked in the machine settings. Through versions 2, 3, 4 and 5 of VB, Windows, regardless of version, has always mapped this folder as drive E.

After the upgrade, these same VB machines now map the drive to the letter Z.

I found the posts that discuss not using Auto Mount, and mapping the drives within the guests themselves to the desired drive letter, but have had problems, which I believe are related to the shared folder having a space in its name. I don't have an urgent requirement to map shared folders to specific drive letters, but I do like consistency.

Since the Windows guest machines didn't change (no recent updates applied), it seems to me VB changed something that causes the guest to choose the last drive letter available, instead of the first open drive letter.

I'd like to not have to change from auto mount to drive mapping on 15 or so guests.

Anyone have any idea what happened, and is there a setting that can be changed? Until the, I reverted back to 5.2.26.

O.N.

[socratis]

If I have understood correctly, VB does not assign drive letters to shared folders, the Windows Guest makes those assignments.

Something like that, yes.

Through versions 2, 3, 4 and 5 of VB, Windows, regardless of version, has always mapped this folder as drive E.

I believe that this was a Windows decision, not a VirtualBox one, but I could be wrong. There's no consistency really on this, or I'm not familiar with one. If you had more drives or CDs in your Win computer, it certainly wouldn't be E: the one that was offered...

After the upgrade, these same VB machines now map the drive to the letter Z.

Yes, something has changed actually, I don't know why, but I think I know which is the correct behavior. If you map a Windows network share, then the letter offered by Windows Explorer is actually the last available one, not the first available one. So maybe a bug was fixed or an erroneous behavior addressed!

All use the same Shared Folder and the Auto Mount option is checked in the machine settings.

There's an additional option there, the "Mount point". Use that to specifically assign a drive letter for the Win guest to map that share to the drive you want in your guest. If "E:\" is your favorite, then fill "E:" in there, don't forget the colon (:)...

I don't have an urgent requirement to map shared folders to specific drive letters, but I do like consistency.

See above.

it seems to me VB changed something that causes the guest to choose the last drive letter available, instead of the first open drive letter.

Again, see above. Or actually have two Windows guest networked and see what Windows offers as a letter when asked to "Remount the share at logon".

I'd like to not have to change from auto mount to drive mapping on 15 or so guests.

Just use the new "Mount point" option in 6.0.x...