Shared Folders / Local Drive in Fusion w/Vista

[Thyge]

This may not be a Fusion specific question, but I thought maybe someone here could help

I am running Windows Vista Business SP1 in Fusion 1.1.1 on a MBP Santa Rosa. I don't store any of my data files within the VM, but store them all on the Mac, and access them from Vista via Fusion Shared Folders. This works great for most situations, but I have one client that wants to sync with some of my data folders by using Microsoft Office Groove. Groove is a Windows only product that can be used to keep two remote folders in sync, but is restricted to local files only. It cannot use network shares or mapped drives. Since this folder resides outside of the VM, Groove only sees it as a remote drive from Vista. I have tried to fool Groove by mapping my "Documents" folder in Vista to "
.host\shared folders\documents," but Groove still sees it as a remote drive.

Does anyone know if there is a way to have a Mac shared folder show up as a local drive in Vista/Fusion?

Thanks for your help!

[bouman21]

In Vista you can make symbolic links, much like linux.

From a dos prompt (as administrator) you can do:

mklink /D folder
server\share

This will make a local folder "folder" on the disk which points to the network share. I hope this is enough for your problem.

[Thyge]

Well, this sounded extremely promising, but Groove still gives me the error about the folder being on a remote drive. I also tried this with a /J to create a junction instead of a symbolic link. It created the folder, but when I tried to access it I got the following error:

"the buffer is invalid"

Is this because the Junction is attempting to attach to a shared folder?

[bouman21]

I think junctions need to be on the same filesystem, it's an ntfs feature.

[elorgwhee]

I just posted this in another thread, but it can help you too. It's a work-around, but it works (though I haven't yet used Groove so I'm not sure if it will fool it into thinking the drives are local or not).

You can install Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection app (free download @ mactopia.com). When you use it, there's an option to connect your local drives to the remote computer. When you do that, they show up as if they're local to the other machine. The catch is, you'd have to connect to your VM using the Remote Desktop app when you want to let Groove sync - not through the Fusion console.