VirtualBox Shared Folder Setup

Would anyone familiar with VirtualBox be kind enough to give me some pointers on what I'm doing wrong? I've got VirtualBox setup on Mandriva 2009 and a Windows XP installation running as a machine. I need to share folders between the two systems.

I set up /home/user/windows-share as a directory in linux, then ran the VM and set that directory as a shared folder. The next step (apparently) is inside Windows to use explorer and browse the network - the folder should appear there.

Except for me, I do not get a folder when I look at the network - it's not there. It does show up in the shared folders section of the VM, so virtualbox seems to know about it.

Any thoughts on how to correct this?

TIA

Edited to add:
Resolution: I needed to add guestadditions to virtualbox. Once I did so, it all worked.

This is a "How to" for Ubuntu but should work just as well on Mandriva...

Enable file sharing in VirtualBox between Ubuntu(Hosts) & XP(Guest) OS

Did you install guest additions?


I guess what threw me the first time I tried to do this was the idea of having two separate folders that are joined, and not actually one shared folder.

Sorry, if Linux was the guest and Windows was the host I could give you an easy step by step how to... =/

Thanks folks. I've solved it. It's really non-intuitive. Here's what I did.
1) went to my software installer and found guest additions, then installed it (i.e. I used my Mandriva software installer, not Virtualbox to do this). This doesnt' install it so much as make the ISO image available in /usr/share/virtualbox/VboxGuestAdditions.iso
2) I added the ISO as a CD image from inside virtualbox. Still not done yet :). (Aside - this actually didn't work. Mandriva installed the ISO as root. I had to change ownership of the ISO file to be the same as the user running virtualbox before it would install).
3) The ISO is now available inside windows explorer as a disk drive. Use explorer to go to that 'drive' and run the installation program, virtualboxguestadditions.exe or something like that.

Now I dont recall the specific order at this point, but vaguely, in virtualbox you need to find the shared folder section and add the path to the linux folder you want to make shared. Once that's done when you go back into the windows machine, open up windows explorer and the shared folder is now available under My Network Places. So you can use the folder directly or do as I did and map a drive to it.

That was relatively non-intuitive to be honest....but worth the effort. This has made virtualbox a huge plus for me. Installing guestadditions, in addition to making the shared drives available, also fixes the screen size issues I had with the virtual machine (windows wasn't showing up full screen).

Glad you solved it!

And you don't have to capture the mouse anymore. (=