the mounted NTFS can't be refreshed

Jacky Ferihmen

Part of your problem is that WinXP buffers data before writing it to disk, so not everything you change in XP is going to immediately go to the hard disk.

However, and more importantly, what you're doing is RISKY! It'd be downright *dangerous* of you'd tried to set up NTFS write support!

AFAIK, there's no way to get WinXP to unmount a filesystem on a fixed disk. (read, non-removable.) Which means that when you try to mount the NTFS filesystem from Linux, you're working with a filesystem that's already mounted, and therefore isn't in a predictable state.

In essence, this is because any modern desktop and-or server operating system keeps some parts of the filesystem up-to-date only in memory, for speed reasons. Direct access to the filesystem data is therefore discouraged, because it's possible that not all of the changes that are-were stored in memory have been saved to disk.

If you really want to share data between a Linux VMWare session and a Windows host using a hard filesystem, get an external USB storage devices...both flash-based and hard-disk-based products should work fine. With external drives, you can tell Windows to unmount the filesystem by going to "Safely Remove Hardware" in the task bar. Then unplug the USB cable, start up VMWare, and plug it back in. VMWare should take control of the device, and allow you to access it directly from your guest OS.

However, a cheaper method would be to create a SMB share on your XP box, and have your guest OS mount it through VMWare's networking abilities. It'll be a little bit slower than direct access to a device, but it's generally less of a hbuttle, and a little bit safer.