Sharing ALL my OS X documents with XP

Hey guys,

I was wondering if I can tweak parallels and have XP be able to access my documents folder on OS X. If I'm not mistaken, I know I can set up a shared folder that allows OS X to see "My Documents" that are on my XP VM, but I really need it to be the other way around. The reason is for printing at my work which is a Windows network.

PS: It would be a lot easier if I could directly print from OS X to the works printer, but I've had major issues trying to get the SAMBA settings to work. Any info to these points would be extremely beneficial.

thanks guys,
cheers.

 

Sharing any or all OS X Folders with XP

You should have installed the parallels tools on XP.

Then you can use the shared folders option in you VM configuration.

You can select any Folder(s) on OS X to be available to XP via the Parallels shared folder shortcut on the XP desktop. If you really wanted to see everything on your Mac including removabe media, try sharing /Volumes. All disks mounted by OS X end up in /Volumes including the startup disk. I don't think this approach is a very good idea.

If you want to do it by network file sharing you need to turn on the windows sharing in the OS X sharing system preference. In the latest versions of Tiger it now prompts you to reenter the passwords for users that will be exporting files. This allows OS X to generate a suitably mangled version of the password so that windows users can authenticate with OS X. In early versions of Tiger I think you had to get the user to change their password so the mangling happened., if you didn't the user's file were not accessible even if you knew their password.

 

Personally, I've had troubles with the Parallels shared folders including file corruption of things moved through them.

What works perfect for me is to get the shareware program: SharePoints. This installs under OS X and lets you define ANY folder as a shared folder for all types of OS's.

The shared folder can then be "mapped" using standard Windows network drive mapping. In my case I always have it mapped to Y and set it to remap on boot. All I do is click on Y and everything in the shared folder is there at network speeds.

Never had a problem with this approach and it's very fast. The benefit of SharePoints is that you can define multiple folders. So you could have Documents, Downloads, etc. all shared and ready to be mapped in WinXP at a moments notice.

M

 

Mark, Fred

Thanks for your input... I'm going to try those solutions right now.

Cheers,
B.