After working on my series about VMware player, I found a few different ways to get files onto and off the Virtual Machines. To give people some ideas, maybe ones they wouldn’t have thought of, or didn’t even know of. This isn’t a complete how to for each method, it is just a list to help people when they are starting with Virtual Machines and can’t figure out how to get their documents onto the VM. If you have any addition please leave it as a comment and I will add it to the list.
Top 10 Ways to Transfer Files between Virtual Machines
1. Physical CDrom drive
2. Iso CDrom Image
3. Physical Floppy Drive (if you actually have one, I used to back in the day)
4. Floppy Image File (generally img files)
5. Web download (via a web browser)
6. FTP Download (via a FTP client or wget)
7. Network Share
8. VMware Disk Mount GUI Disk Mount tool
9. Disk Converter (physical to Virtual Conversion)
10. Virtual Image Creator (Virtual to Virtual Conversion)
March 8th, 2007 at 3:11 am
Shared Folders (although this is disabled on Player)
March 10th, 2007 at 1:56 am
When networking wasn’t available, I’ve also made use of the Microsoft Loopback Adapter to move files from host to virtual machine. Hope that helps!
March 30th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
I have also used a USB key (plug in Host, copy, unplug and plug in guest)
April 6th, 2007 at 5:03 am
An external USB drive works good too. It can be mounted on the host or the guest but not both at the same time. But it works out of the box. No setup is required.