How does one access HDDs from within a VM
 

I'm running Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit inside VMWare Player 4.0.2 on a Windows 7 64-bit PC. How do I get control of the HDDs on the Win 7 PC?

The control between a guest and a host in a virtualizer comes just in one direction.

You can totally control you guest from your host, but you cannot change anything in your host from your guest.

Believe me, you don't want to have to OSes that are both in control of the HDDs, that would seriously corrupt your system. May be you explain a little more what you intend to do, so that we are able to say if it is possible what you want to achieve.

In virtualbox you can share a folder I suppose VMWare has a equal function.

I downloaded a file in Ubuntu and wanted to use it in Win 7.

Also, in the Home folder there is a folder called "Browse the contents of the Network" and in that folder is a folder named "Windows Network" but when you open it it's empty.

That's for if you have any folders on your windows machine that are shared on the network.

You can accomplish what you want with shared folders through VMWare. Click on your VM, then click on "Edit virtual machine settings", then the Options tab, then Shared Folders. From there you can share certain Windows folders with the VM, and they should end up somewhere in /mnt. It would be advisable to create a special folder for this, called something like VMShare, which you can then use as a portal to pass files back and forth between Windows and the VM.

That sounds like the ticket. Thanks

Oh, could you expand "/mnt"?

Well, I created a new folder on 1 of my Win 7 partitions and labeled it "VMShares". I enabled this folder in the VM as described above. But I still can not locate the folder in Ubuntu. I open the HomeFolder and under computer/file systems I see a folder called "/mnt". But it contains an empty folder called "hgfs".

Any suggestions?