I am running Ubuntu within VMware on Windows 7 because I need to transfer files to and from a hybrid MBR/GPT hard drive for legacy hardware. I do have a dedicated Ubuntu machine I could have used, but I wanted to test the capabilities of VMware because my Windows 7 machine is faster. (I chose Ubuntu 7.10 because I do not like the latest versions installed and because those versions don't seem able to see external hard drives out of the box at all.)
Here's what it looked like a few minutes after starting the file transfer:
Here is what it looked like 19 hours later:
Checking it occasionally I would see that it hasn't actually frozen because the estimated time to completion gradually gets longer, but it's always stuck on the same file that it was on from the beginning. At this point I just powered down the workstation and moved them to a real Ubuntu computer. but is VMware just incapable of handling file transfers like this? It seems like it's having problems buffering the files for transfer or maybe it's loosing system resources or something. Is there anything that will make it work?
Note: Windows 7 can correctly see the drives in disk management, it just won't let me access the file structures so there is no reason to believe that there is an issue with Windows 7 being at fault here - especially since the file transfers do work initially.