Hi,

I'm trying to share my D: drive (not simultaneously of course) between an XP VM and a Win7 VM. Even though the username is the same on both VMs, when I try to access the files Win7 says I have no PERMISSION to my files I created on XP.

How does Windows manage identities and file ownership (like Unix UIDs)? And how do I make Win7 give my user the same attributes as the same user on XP.

PS: I don't have an AD domain controller, so I can't use that to make the users the same.

PPS: Just had a thought.. I could get concurrent access and user control with Samba, but not sure how to do seamless user authentication without AD. Perhaps I could use a junction to LINK to the Samba drive. A Network share should work for both, assuming PRIVILEGES have been set correctly and firewall configured to allow. What i have done for my virtual machines is map a network share to a drive letter. Then reference that drive letter that is the share between all. Permissions can be set to EVERYONE if you working behind a firewall and no one else on your network to mess with your data. I use this configuration with it set to EVERYONE having Read/Write access on my private network which WORKS better than trying to match up users that are the same between varying OS versions. Setting to Everyone usually is the fix, but only a fix if used on a network that is safe to set to Everyone.Alternately you should be able to right clik the drive in the Admin account and select "take ownership"...Actually - I think the easiest solution is now that I already have a D: drive on the WinXP VM, just share it with CIFS to the Win7 VM.

The only remaining 2 issues are (1) that the Win7 VM is 95% busy CPU when it should be idle, and (2) working out how tp tell Win7 to use the network share as the user's home area. Junctions don't seem to cut the mustard for Win7 in the way they do on XP.