XP does not see new physical HDD

Have Win 7 pro and virtual XP. Just installed a new, second, physical HDD in Win 7, drive D:. Everything is normal in Win 7. But why does this drive not show up in the XP My Computer under Hard Disk Drives? Can I do something to get it in there? If not, how can I access it from XP? I have tried sharing, integration enabled, etc. and just about everything else and while I can map the drive in XP, I always get access denied if I try to open it. And it is shared with everyone and all permissions are enabled.

Best case would be for XP just to see a second Local Drive. Otherwise is there a tutorial for sharing/mapping a Win 7 drive into XP. Searched a lot but could not find a solution.

Thanks a lot.

LowPingBoy

Hi there
You need to Mount the disk as a NETWORK drive in the XP Virtual machine

for example if your W7 computer host name is HORSE then say the new HDD on W7 is volume F:

Then you need to connect network drive \\HORSE\F on the XP VM. (Or if you know the IP address when the HOSTNAME resolution fails to connect then try for example \\192.XX.XX.XX\F or whatever the Ip address is).

You might need to enable the correct Network setting on the VM system -- NAT usually works otherwise try Bridged or "Host only" networking -- these settings are usually found in thge Virtual Machine configuration files.

Ensure also you can PING the Host machine from the VM and also ping the VM from the Host.

Ensure that the drive is visible and formatted on the Host W7 system first.

Note also that you must have also enabled the Host drive to be SHARED so it can be seen on your network (a single VM running on an independent stand alone laptop is still a "Network" even if your host machine isn't actually connected to the Internet or a router).

(Finally sometimes you need to set a user password since I think with some of the latest security updates Windows is getting fussy about user accounts without a password -- you can still set the login to bypass the initial screen even with a password if you want to).

Cheers
jimbo

Jimbo:

Thanks a lot for the helpful discussion and instructions. Worked well for me. Just seems kind of crazy that a physical drive, in the box, has to be a network drive as if it were 1,000 miles away. Just one of many things about the VM that has me mystified and not particularly pleased.

Thanks again.

LPB

LowPingBoy said:

Jimbo:

Thanks a lot for the helpful discussion and instructions. Worked well for me. Just seems kind of crazy that a physical drive, in the box, has to be a network drive as if it were 1,000 miles away. Just one of many things about the VM that has me mystified and not particularly pleased.

Thanks again.

LPB

Hi there
remember a VM is to all intents and purposes just like a separate machine (even if it's on your own box) and therefore it's a second machine and as a consequence to connect to devices on your host it will behave as a second machine on a LAN (i.e on a network) Network.

Note - the VM could actually be on a remote server and you would connect to it just the same.

In fact a lot of times in larger offices when you might think you have connected to their computer system / server it could be a "Virtual Machine" being run form some server farm a long way away.

It's the whole point of Virtual Machines -- to make them as near as possible behave just like physical machines.

In the commercial world since modern servers are so powerful it's quite often to see several different customers having their own personal office "Virtual Servers" supplied from maybe say an independent Data / Server "Farm" since the remote data centre could supply loads of these and it's often cheaper this way than a customer buying their own machine.

Cheers
jimbo