So this was a silly problem I ran into today and it’s really only the lack of very specifically labeled help available online about that caused me to write this. Basically what I did was to install Debian 6 64 with vmware inside of a windows 7 machine. I cringe to think I am doing it this way as I know Debian has a way smaller footprint to run as a host however the hardware compatibility issues after 2 years of running Debian have finally gotten to me and also I feel I have enough cpu and ram to do it this way so here I am.
So the issue I ran into after doing a fresh install of Debian from the netinst.iso image was that I wasn’t able to mount my shares. I could run vmware-hgfsclient and see my shares show up just fine and dandy but when I tried to mount them I was greeted with this message:
Error: cannot mount filesystem: No such device
Good times.
What the problem actually was was that ‘make’ wasn’t installed by default with my OS.. I just figured it was a standard installed item as well it’s just a little important, but surprisingly enough it was no where to be found and I only discovered this by accident 2 days later. So I installed make and then uninstalled vmware tools and just re-installed it again.. This time I was greeted with a ton of extra lines as things were being properly compiled and as soon as it was done the shared dirs came up instantly.. I am actually quite shocked at how amazingly easy they work.. Even my external USB drive I just plug it in and there it is.. Huzzah!
So, moral of the story, make sure that make is installed, and if all else fails try to uninstall and reinstall vmware tools