I don’t use the free player
Mike but the vmworkstation has a couple of options;
1. To connect files between two windows systems (
ie. The host machine and the virtual satellite) can share a folder… map the drive in the same way any other windows networked machines can.
2. If you install vmtools then the two can read each others clipboards i.e. copy and paste… Ubuntu can read a windows file so this tends to be a good option for quick transfer of small files.
3. Advanced users can mount a physical harddrive into the virtual machine… hyper-v is better at doing this but its not that much harder in vmware.
Note; you can mount the entire drive or just a partition… again Ubuntu reads windows hardware better than most and certainly better than windows reads linux drives.
I strongly recommend putting a tick in the independent box when mounting any physical hardware so that snapshots don’t corrupt your data… snapshots are a great thing but not when two machines have to share the same drive.
p.s. windows 7 can also mount v-drives of vhd or vhdx in the same way that 8 and 8.1 can but that gets a bit risky and wouldn’t help much with Linux drives in any event.
Pps. two notes on resources;
1. vmware (
with tools installed) needs about a gig of the host machines ram and by default will place the v-page files on the drive it is installed on. Best practice is to install onto a non-system drive i.e not the c drive.
2. Ime mounting the drive the vmware is physically installed on will cause issues if the host is windows 7 but they appear to have fixed this restriction in 8.