In Windows Virtual PC: Is there a way to assign local drive letter in the Guest O/S that points to a physical drive on the host?

Question

I have a bunch of programming projects on my P:\ drive (on Windows 7)

I'm now doing some programming within Virtual PC Windows XP Mode and I'd like to "call" that drive, within the Win XP guest, the P: drive. I've mapped drive letter P: to "network" drive on the Host but that goes across the network so it's very slow.

I tried using the SUBST command but it wouldn't take the \tsclients\p as a parameter. Basically, the command line interpreter (is that DOS on Win 7 ??) doesn't recognize that directory (\tsclients\p)

Answer 1

I tried mapping a network drive (P) to tsclient\p but it was incredibly slow accessing the drive. A blog entry on an MS blog confirmed that Virtual PC accesses a local mapped network drive slower than it would a network resource (which in itself is much slower than a local drive).

However, the NET USE command provided very fast access:

NET USE P: \\tsclient\p
Where P is the new drive letter you want to be able to use within VPC And \\tsclient\p is the UNC path to the Host

Executed from the Command line within the Virtual PC Guest) created a local P: drive linked to the Host's P drive.

Apparently, this command provides a direct "link" to between the aliased drive letter and the path, without making a round trip through the Network like a Mapped Network drive would.