[SOLVED] Mageia not copying from VirtualBox 4.1.4 Host share

[Cracker42]

I have Mageia up and running in VirtualBox 4.1.4r74291 and after getting the GuestAdditions to install successfully I have been happily exploring it's features and the KDE plasma interface having been a Linux Mint 11 with Gnome desktop user. So far I'm liking KDE and the fact that desktop themes actually install and work successfully and I can change my mouse pointer at will unlike my Mint 11 Gnome (but that's another story). I have my Windows 7 64-bit host OS drive shared in VB and have created a mount point and successfully added it to the "fstab" file so it's available in Mageia. That all works ok. The problem I've run into is that when I copy files from my Windows 7 NTFS partition to a folder (doesn't matter which folder I choose) in my VM (the hard drive is MAGEIA.VDI and Mageia is using EXT4 file system) it goes through the copy motions with no errors but all I'm left with is 0 length files in the destination directory. I've been looking for a solution but so far I haven't had any luck fixing this problem. My Linux Mint 11 Gnome works perfectly copying files to/from the NTFS partition so I know that VirtualBox is running correctly. It has to be something in Mageia that I need to install or configure that I'm overlooking due to my ignorance with this flavor of Linux.

[Cracker42]

[Problem Solved]

It turned out to be an error with files from my other Linux folder I was copying using the NTFS host with a shared directory that Mageia has access to. The directory I was copying from Linux Mint 11 was the ".opera" folder so I can have all my bookmarks and Speed Dial items in Mageia the same as my Linux Mint 11 has. The problem was that I had forgotten that I had fould a script that I had used in Linux Mint 11 that created symbolic links to my Windows 7 Opera browser profile and while it looks and works perfect in Gnome as a symbolic link when I copied the ".opera" folder first to my Windows 7 host and then back into Mageia of course the files that are just links end up as a 0 length file in the Mageia destination folder. This was a Homer Simpson DOH!!! moment for me. I found the script and by running it in Mageia Linux in the ".opera" folder after deleting the default Opera browser files it created the link files correctly and everything is there in my Mageia Opera browser.

This does show the power of Linux and VirtualBox in that I have the Opera browser installed in Windows 7 Pro 64-bit and have synbolic links to them in both Mageia and Linux Mint 11. I am being careful not to run Opera in multiple OSes simultaneously to avoid problems with file updates possibly causing file corruption if 2 Opera's try to write to the same file at the same time but so far I haven't run into any problems. Of course I'm keeping backups of my Windows 7 Opera profile for safety. It's even easier in my Thunderbird email as all that was required was to edit the email .INI file and change the path to my Windows 7 Thunderbird email profile location and avoiding running Thunderbird in Windows 7 and Mageia at the same time.

A final word on this it that the shared data file technique will only work if the program that has a Windows and Linux version of it utilizes the exact same file and data structure in both. Since Thunderbird email works this should work with Firefox too but I haven't tried that yet.