virtualbox.org

I have VBox running Windows 7 on a Linux Mint Rosa host. I have a shared folder in the home directory that works fine - appears as an extra drive in the Win 7 guest. HOWEVER, this computer has a couple of other hard disks in it. Those drives are formatted NTSF, so that is not an issue for Windows. I would like to add one of these drives to the Windows guest so it can read/write to that disk. However, the ONLY disk that shows up in the "shared folders" options in VBox is the main disk of the host machine, the disk I booted Linux from. Can someone point me at the docs I need to add one of the other drives as a shared folder so the Windows guest can see it?

Why? I hope you aren't under the impression that this will improve performance. It remains a virtual drive regardless of whether access is at the filesystem or sector level, however the sector level is likely to be slower, as it bypasses the host filesystem cache.

Otherwise, if the host OS can access those NTFS drives then you can share any of its folders like you already did with the home directory folder.

I don't believe that the OP is asking about raw disk access, the reference to NTFS was unfortunate. The question is about the selector in the shared folders; they can only see the "root" hard drive.

@callmeishmael: if you open the "Disks" utility, you should see the mount point of your other disks. That's where you should point the selection. For example if I add another HD in my Mint, it shows mounted at "/media/socratis/New Volume". So, in order to select it, I'd have to navigate to "/media/socratis/New Volume".

The fact that it is NTFS formatted is irrelevant, it could be anything, as you saw with your home directory share.

@socratis

Thank you very, very MUCH! Followed your instructions and got it working perfectly now.