virtualbox.org

Hello

I've installed VBox 4.1.6 along with the respective extension pack. I've installed WinXP in a guest PC and also installed the guest additions. I've enabled Shared Folders and mapped 2 host folders as network drives on my PC.

Remark/Wish #1. VBox maps them to the first available drive letters. This is not very convenient. It would be much better if you could select the drive letters in the "Shared Folders" configuration window.

I didn't like what i saw so i added the same mapping (\\vboxsrv\blah) to two other drive letters and made the map permanent. I've also setup my windows guest to autologin and execute a couple of programs from the newly mapped drives (the permanent ones, not the ones originally mapped by VBox). It worked just fine for a few restarts but today i started seeing strange stuff. First of all, after a restart, i got a message that one of the programs i execute from the mapped drives had crashed. When i pressed OK to close the crash info window, immediately the virtual machine started booting (as if i had just pressed the power-on button)! No blue screens, no nothing. Just booting again. The problem was circumvented by removing those programs from startup but IMO this is a bug, so i'm reporting it here. Please note that it does not happen all the time. There's a 50% chance of it happening.

Having programs start automatically can be a problem. If the program tries to run before the guest has fully loaded the things it needs this can happen.
Try setting a timer in you startup script and adjust accordingly.

Perryg wrote:Having programs start automatically can be a problem.

Yup, i can understand how this could be a problem but how difficult would it be for VBox to load all required things before the user logs-in and set all drive mappings in time? I tried enabling the policy settings to start startup/logon scripts synchronously, just in case, but no luck (probably because the mappings are performed by the guest additions, right?).

Well that would be a Windows call on when to load programs and or drivers. How hard? It can be impossible.

Yes the guest additions (vboxservice) that must be loaded before the shared folder can become active.

Like I said the easiest way is to set timers/pauses. what ever your start script allows. Then it is just a matter of tuning.

Perryg wrote:Like I said the easiest way is to set timers/pauses. what ever your start script allows. Then it is just a matter of tuning.

Perhaps there is a way for the GuestAdditions service to complete all the necessary tasks (and mappings) and then send to Windows the "OK" to continue with the startup process and let the Login Window appear.

Anyway, i'm already in the process of implementing such a solution. Thanks for your suggestion.