How To Share Local Drives and Folders with a Guest OS in VMWare Workstation

VMware Workstation provides an important facility to share local drives and folders of Host OS with Guest OS so that your virtual machine can easily access data from you Host OS/PC. This saves a lot of time.  To share drives and folders, you must have the most recent version of VMware Tools installed in the Guest OS.  Lets have a look we are going to add folder/drive in Virtual Machine Control Panel. Here, I am demonstrating to share/map my Download folder from host to Windows 8  Guest VM.

Select Virtual Machine in VMware Workstation>>Click on VM Option>>Choose Setting

(Ctrl+D is shortcut keys to launch settings)

Then Select Option Tab>>Click Always Enable if you want permanently share the drive into Guest OS or can choose Enable until Power Off/Suspend for temporary availability.>>Click Add

Sharing Wizard will popup Click Next>>

Browse and Select the drive/folder what you want inside your Guest OS. 

I am selecting Download Folder as I have described above.

Selection would be like this, Click on Next.

If you want to check Read only Option, Check it here.  This will restrict  your sharing into Read Only permissions.

Now, I have share Download Folder as Mapped network drive in Guest OS.

Great!, You can see, My Download folder of Host OS is not mapped/share in my Windows 8 Guest OS.

Thank You. Please comment if you found any difficulty/problem.

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