virtualbox.org

This is my first post, so please forgive me if I don't supply the right info. I use Virtualbox on my Windows 7 64-bit host to build my Windows images. I install Windows 7-64 as a guest, do my updates and application installs, then the sysprep steps. I then change the setting in my VM to boot from a WinPE ISO, share a folder on my external drive, and change the network adapter to host only. Once booted from the WinPE ISO, I could run a net use command to mount the shared folder, and capture my image there.

All worked well a month or so ago, but when I tried it today, I couldn't map the drive. I think the error message was an System Error 53 - The network path was not found. I tried switching back to the bridged adapter and mapping an actual network share, and got the same message. After some googling I saw some threads where people recently had trouble with Linux guests. I also saw some things related to guest additions, but when I boot from the WinPE ISO I'm not using guest additions. I decided to try downgrading VirtualBox from 4.3.10 to 4.3.8. When I did this, everything worked immediately, so it seems like something changed in the update.

Has anyone else run into shared folder problems since upgrading to 4.3.10?

Not as far as I know for Windows guests. Yes, there was an issue with Linux guest additions for Ubuntu based systems and mounting of VBox volumes, but you're not even close to that neighborhood. If it it reproducible, I would head to the bugtracker.

I think I figured it out. It wasn't a problem with 4.3.10 at all. It turns out that if I happened to launch VirtualBox while I was running my Cisco AnyConnect VPN, then it would somehow interfere with the "Host Only" network setting.

I stumbled upon this because I finally had some time to reinstall 4.3.10 yesterday. I was able to mount my shared folder, so I thought it must have just been a weird glitch. Then today I tried it again after updating my image, and it failed. I uninstalled 4.3.10 and reinstalled 4.3.8. At some point in the uninstall/install it dropped the VPN connection, which made me suspicious. I reinstalled 4.3.10, and tried it with and without the VPN, and was able to reproduce the problem. Fortunately, I don't need to run my VPN very often, so I'll just make sure it's not connected when I need to do this again.