Windows Service cannot read VMWare Player shared folder

[jurgenv]

Hey forum,

I have vmware player installed on an Ubuntu 14.04 host and have a VM running Windows 7. This VM has a shared folder that contains some files. There is also a WinRun4J Windows service that needs to access these files on the shared folder. For some reason I get an error. This is the error:

java.io.FileNotFoundException: Z:\data\configs\service.config (The system cannot find the path specified)

Z exists. The file exists. The path is correct. I can see the file in explorer. I can access the file with Notepad++, I can even access this file using the same Java code using WinRun4J from a cmd shell. It only fails when this code is run as a service. Unfortunately it needs to run as a service. How can I fix this?

I already tried running the service under the same user account as I'm logged in as. This didn't solve the problem.

VMWare Player: 6.0.3-1895310.x86_64

Windows: 6.1.7601

WinRun4J: 0.4.5

thanks,

Jurgen

[jurgenv]

As it turns out it wasn't a vmware problem. Windows just can't do this. Here is the KB article: INFO: Services and Redirected Drives.

The solution was to not point the service to Z: but instead to \\vmware\sharename