Shared folders IFS for VBox Additions, the test version

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi G.M. Anchieri

How is the HDD that has the JFS partition connected to your Windows PC? Is it IDE, SATA?
Is it a different HDD from the one that you are booting Windows? Or is it like a dual boot machine where you have Windows partitions and the JFS partition on the same HDD?

I have never tried it, but maybe you can connect that HDD to USB with an adapter, and attach the USB device to the ArcaOS Guest.

Regards

[ivan]

I think we need to establish some baseline parameters for this problem first.

1)  Where are these JFS partitions - on the ArcaOS virtual drive or the win 7 hard disk?
2)  How did you create and format the JFS partitions considering that windows knows nothing about JFS partitions and will not see them?
3)  Assuming you intend using the JFS partitions to transfer information between ArcaOS and win 7  how do you propose doing that when win 7 does not see JFS partitions?
4)  Are you going to write a JFS file system driver to allow win7 to see and read JFS formatted partitions?
5)  You do realise that the 'shared folders' option in vBox additions requires the host OS to be able to see and interact with the selected file system?  It is not a translation layer to convert file systems.

Sorry if this seems hard but you must realise that vBox is limited to what the host system can see and read/write when transferring data between host and client.  Even if you use a large plugin USB drive to transfer data both the host OS and guest OS must be able to read the formatted drive.

[Lars]

Shared folders are for a completely different purpose.
They allow folders on the host to be accessible from the guest. And not the other way around.
I have a download folder (NTFS) under Win10 that I make accessible in the OS/2 guest. That works fine. The OS/2 guest needs to assign a drive letter for this folder. This is exactly what the shared folder support allows to do.

[G. M. Anchieri]

To all that has replied to my question,
I want explain what I have in mind to do:
1) my PC is an ASUS PRIME B250M-A with 8GB of ram, one SSD of 500GB and one sata disk of one TB
2) on SSD I have: a primary partition with Win7 Pro 64bit and a ARCAOS5.06 primary partition and other four
    partition formatted in JFS used by ARCSOS, and one partition formatted in FAT32 that I use for passing data
    from the two system.
3) normally I work with ARCAOS because I was an ancient user of OS2 my first pc was equipped with OS2 1.2
4) on ARCAOS I have installed VBOX 5.071 that run Win7 Pro 32bit and I can execute some task that I can do only
    using Windows
5) In some circumstance I start Win7 pro 64bit for Work that request  many more ram then that supported by
    VBOX-5071 on ARCAOS
    in this situation I want to be able to do some task using ARCAOS, that I have installed under VBOX 6.122 that run
    on Win7 pro, to do so I have the necessity to have my JFS DISK attached to VM on Windows.
6) Final, it's this possible?.

Thank you all very much,
Regards G.M. Anchieri   

[Dave Yeo]

Isn't there a VirtualBox drive pass through thing? Quickly searching, yes it seems to be described in section 9.10 of the manual. Linux description, https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=25221 where the only problem was permissions. This should work to mount you SSD, though perhaps not since you are also booting Windows from it, I think it should though it needs testing.

[Doug Bissett]

Isn't there a VirtualBox drive pass through thing? Quickly searching, yes it seems to be described in section 9.10 of the manual. Linux description, https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=25221 where the only problem was permissions. This should work to mount you SSD, though perhaps not since you are also booting Windows from it, I think it should though it needs testing.

I played with that, a couple of years ago. I was using a win 10 host, VBox 5.<something> and one of the earlier ArcaOS versions. It worked okay with a FAT32 drive (less than 2 GB, and removed from windows to avoid conflicts). Trying to use it with a JFS volume looks like it would work, BUT, the LVM information is NOT passed through. Only the raw partition is made available, and VBox adds a partition wrapper that contains the partition information (including the lack of LVM information). At that point I quit, because I didn't want to mess with the partition in question. I am not sure if LVM, in the guest, would add valid LVM information to the pseudo drive, or not. If it will, I am not sure if it will remember it. I am also not too sure if doing that will cause other problems. It really shouldn't, as long as the drive is properly closed at shutdown, but that is untested, by me.

I should return to that, because I would also like to be able to use a real JFS drive from an ArcaOS system, in VBox. I suggest that you need a test system, where it doesn't matter if it gets messed up. Be sure to test what happens when the VBox is terminated (reset it), and when the host is terminated (pull the plug). If a simple CHKDSK recovers it, all is good (probably a good idea to try it multiple times)

FTR, using Shared Folders won't do it, unless the host system can read (and possibly write) the JFS partition. It will probably work with a Linux host, when it supports JFS drives (Puppy Linux, used by the DFSEE Linux packages, does that). In VBox, the Shared folders are presented to the guest as network drives.

I said "JFS", but it should apply to HPFS too.