Sharing FAT32 file system

[LawrenceHare]

I just upgraded to Build 3106 Beta 3 and I confess I am delighted, coherence is wonderful and, as I work in an environment where PCs are required, it makes my life so easy. I would like therefore to remove Boot Camp from my Mac Book Pro. I have a FAT32 file partition on the Mac that is used as a shared folder in Parallels, all my work data is held in this partition that Boot Camp uses as does Parallels and OS X. This works fine.

On my big PC at home I use a product called SureSync which is a file synchronization tool. It can access shared folders across the web and synchronize them with other machines, but PCs only (although it can use ftp and access UNIX boxes). What I do is I boot up the Mac in Boot Camp where I have my data folder "shared" via Windows XP's share service. Over on my PC I fire up SureSync and it links to the shared folder on the Mac and does a sync, so now all my files are updated on two machines, and on the Mac I can access them via Boot Camp, Parallels and OS X. I want to dump Boot Camp however.

I cannot find a way to share the same folders through Parallels on to the network, in effect it seems they are already shared via the Parallels tool, shared between OS X and Parallels. But I want to share the same folder, via Parallels' instance of OS X to the network so that other PCs can see it. I have my work files visible in XP using Parallels share, now I want to use XP's share facility to share the files to the network and access them via another XP system.

The Share option is present on other folders within the Parallels world, but not on folders which are accessed via the Parallels-share option.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can accomplish this?

I would like to copy the ENTIRE shared work folder to the OS X file system, dump Boot Camp and the current Parallels shared folders, dump the old FAT32 work file system and now use the Mac file system and access my work folders on OS X via Parallels' shared folders facility (much like I do now only instead of my work folders living in a FAT32 partition they would live under OS X.) This would save a ton of disk space. But the "Share" issue still exists, how would I then share the work files using XP's share facility?

If I put all my work files into the Parallels XP file system, then I can share them to other PCs via the network but OS X cannot see them.

Any suggestions?

Thanks - Lawrence

 

[titetanium]

I think I understand what you're getting at. Presently, this configuration is what I have: a share folder in my /home partition called "My Documents". This is created natively on the host OS. Then in the parallels configuration panel, configure the share folder to use "My Documents" so that it shows up as a drag and drop shared folder. Boot into the W2K VM, map that folder to E: as E:\Documents. Then redirect the "My Documents" folder on the deskop in W2K to point to E:\Documents so that all documents created gets dumped in there and you can access it in both the host OS and Windows without having to create a scratch partition. All files are on the host OS' native file system format.

That pretty much sounds like what you want. Next, I think you would enable file and printer sharing in the W2K VM and share the "My Documents" as a network share so other computers can read/write to it instead of a separate scratch partition and/or a sync utility. You don't use the parallels share to do this with, but the W2K's native file sharing utility.

Does that work for you?

 

[titetanium]

Apparently, you can't share the network drive if it's already mapped in windows. :-(
However, as a workaround, you could share the folder from the mac to the network while using the shared folders feature in parallels at the same time.

 

[joem]

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you are trying to do, but if you want a set of files to exist on the OSX file system and be shared with a guest and with other network machines, share the folder tree under OSX. Then the rest of the network can see them. You can designate that folder as shared under Parallels as well, or access it over the network from the guest just like any other network machine.