I am a relative noob to Linux and I am having trouble finding information on the (seemingly) basics.

I have a machine running XP and VMware with a Fedora 7 virtual machine. I have 4 partitions (e.g. photos, website...) and I was hoping to have shared access, XP and Linux, to these partitions.

After a lot of fiddling (sorry, I didn't note down what I did but I found that setting the drives as 'shared' in Windows did most of the trick), now in Fedora I have a 'windows network' desktop icon with the name of my Windows machine. It takes a while to first open, and it lists not only the drives I added (e.g. "Pictures (P)", "Websites (W)"...) but also all the Windows drives listed as "C$", "P$", "W$"... These latter drives with the $'s are inaccessible without authentication; I haven't figured out which username password is required for this authentication but I don't really need them as the drives I added (again, listed as "Pictures (P)" or "Websites (W)") are viewable and editable.

Now the questions:

1. Is there a more direct way to set up shared access? (My attempt at installing Samba on a previous occasion resulted in a non-ending list of dependent modules and eventually destroyed the Linux installation... I haven't installed Samba on this installation.)

2. Can, or should, I unmap the "C$..." drives? If so, how? (I'm thinking of how long it takes to simply open the Windows Network window.)

3. What address do I use in a config file to refer to these shared drives?

(My goal is to keep the local copy of my website where it is, editable with the Windows machine, and to use the Linux machine as a test web server. It is the Apache config file that I am trying to edit, changing the default location "/var/www/html" to something like "smb://WinMachName/Websites%20(W)/www". I've tried several variations of this latter address with no luck; Apache wouldn't start up. Any suggestions on a better way of setting up a test web server would be much appreciated. I have used WAMP in the past but thought that the VMware option would give me a taste of how web servers work, as well as finally get me working with Linux.)

Ok
Still not sure about your setup but I would do this.

As root
cd /
mkdir XP

mount_smbfs //Your XP PC's name/The volume you are sharing from the XP PC /XP
cd /XP
ln -s /var/www/html/

If there is a directory within /XP cd to that directory then create the link.

Caveat I'm a BSD guy haven't touched Fedora/RedHat in Years

Thanks for the suggestion Netman4ttm. It tried it but the command mount_smbfs is not recognized (Fedora 7). I tried searching for the command (hoping that it might show up in a package) but didn't get anywhere. Based on the search, I think the command may be Unix and BSD only...

I'm now trying several bits I found under 'mounting smbfs drives' but so far, no luck. (I am rather in stabbing in the dark as most of these instructions are either very specific or very complicated. I guess I'm looking for a generic and easy to understand approach... or a specific one that works!)

Try;
mount -t smbfs instead of mount_smbfs

I think that is the linux version

You might need to get samba-common

Thanks for the reply, Netmann4ttm. I've been away from the virtual-Linux-web-server for a bit.

I tried your suggested command, but I get:

mount: unknown filesystem type 'smbfs'

I have Samba-common installed...

Let me try restating my problem, and maybe someone may have an idea:

I'd like to have a partition that is accessible from Windows (i.e. edit the website using Dreamweaver in Windows), that can also be used as the Apache DocumentRoot.