USB disk on workstation 7

Question

dunno if this is the right place, so forgive me in case if not.

Hi, I have a couple of vmware images that I would like to share the same USB disk with. The scenario is like this:

* One USB disk
* The laptop that runs vmWare Workstation 7 (on a Windows 7 32bit XP pro. machine)
* 2 vmWare images that runs windows XP pro

I want to map a disk F: for all three machines to this USB disk. Is that possible?

Geir Otto

Answer 1

Well, it's a bit of a cludge, but I think that using USB support in any of the virtual machines would block the host or other machines from seeing the drive, at least is does on my VirtualBox (not sure about VMWare):

You would start up the usb drive and make sure it is drive F: in the host, then in each virtual machine specify a Shared Folder as per the following site:

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws4/doc/running_sharefold_ws.html

and then within each virutal machine go to My Computer and map a drive to a network share.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308582

In each virtual machine you would select the path as

\\.host\Shared Folders\MySharedFolder

or whatever the path is, then the drive as F:

This would make the drive assessible in host and virtual machines with the one caveat that it would not be a "removable" drive...