virtualbox.org

I'm guessing it's a hidden wish of many people to be able to mount a folder of the Host as a normal drive in a guest. I can imagine this can be greatly difficult to achieve. Has there been any research on the matter? Are there any plans?

wand wrote:I can imagine this can be greatly difficult to achieve.

In fact it isn't difficult at all. Mapping a shared folder to a drive letter is a standard feature of the Windows shell. Right click on start button | Explore | Tools | Map network drive.

mpack wrote:Mapping a shared folder to a drive letter

That's not what i meant. Maybe i wasn't clear. What i meant is to be able to mount a host folder as a new HDD in the guest environment. As things are now, there are major issues (always talking about windows environments).

1. There is no way to make a junction in the guest to point to a host folder since the "shared folder" is accessed via networking and junctions under windows do not support network destinations.
2. If you are using a network adapter in Bridged mode and the host is not physically connected to the network, you may be unable to see the shared folders.

I'm sure there may be other issues which may be resolved if you could do what i asked for. I still think though it will be pretty difficult to implement (unfortunately).

wand wrote:I still think though it will be pretty difficult to implement (unfortunately).

Impossible I would say. A virtual drive image is sector based (i.e. it's an image) - it isnt clear to me how you could map that concept to a folder, other than by the virtual image file techniques used already.

mpack wrote:

wand wrote:I still think though it will be pretty difficult to implement (unfortunately).

Impossible I would say. A virtual drive image is sector based (i.e. it's an image) - it isnt clear to me how you could map that concept to a folder, other than by the virtual image file techniques used already.

Well, many things depend on the driver. Perhaps there is a way to achieve such a feature, that's why i asked if there has been any research on the matter. In linux it seems easier to do such a thing but i don't know about windows. There are technologies like iSCSI which perhaps could be used for the task...