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I've been trying to access my shared folders from the command line in my virtual machine with no luck. I've stumbled across a couple of references to using net use to establish a virtual drive, but i can't get this to work correctly:

net use z: \\.host\y (where y is my shared folder)
net use z: \\.host\shared folders\y

Neither of these works. Any pointers?

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3 Answers

In place of ".host" have you tried its IP address instead? Also... Any chance that the VM was hosted on a different host at any point?

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i'm not sure how to find out the ip address of the host. it's physically on the same machine. would i just use the default gateway address? if so, that doesn't work. no, the vm was never hosted anywhere else. –  jim Aug 21 '10 at 23:18
Which type of networking is set up on the guest - bridged or NAT? If it is setup for NAT, then the host IP in that arrangement is the NAT default gateway/DHCP server. –  user48838 Aug 22 '10 at 6:48
yes, it's setup as nat, the default gateway address produced the same error: 67. –  jim Aug 22 '10 at 14:46
Is the "host" machine that you are trying to reach actually another "guest" virtual machine which is also on a NAT setup? If so, you will need to consider changing it over to Bridged or creating and "internal" network (via Internal virtual NICs) between the virtual machines. –  user48838 Aug 22 '10 at 19:08
no, the host is the physical machine the vm is running on. –  jim Aug 22 '10 at 20:03
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are you going to do it only once ? If yes, use scp to finish your work quickly :> Are you sure that the folders are shared ? Were you able to access them from another machine ?

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no, i'm going to be doing it on regular intervals. this is for a batch file for backing up files to another drive in shared folders which is on the same machine which is hosting the vm. –  jim Aug 21 '10 at 22:50
ok then. but the question remains :> were you able to access the shared folder from another machine ? That's a question to determine if the problem is located in VM's configuration or in the connection between VM and host machine. –  Nikolaidis Fotis Aug 21 '10 at 23:35
i've never tried accessing the share from another machine. the share is enabled from directly within vmware workstation solely for that particular machine. –  jim Aug 22 '10 at 14:47
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up vote 0 down vote accepted

ok, after much pounding my head, i found the answer. it actually had nothing to do with the vm, the network, or permissioning. turns out it was a short 8.3 format name problem. as can be seen in my question i was calling 'shared folders' without quotes and without short syntax. to correctly call shared folders from within a vm (or otherwise) from the cmd line, you must wrap up the directory call in quotes as below:

dir "\.host\shared folders"


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