Hey Rtcarry,
Sorry for late reply I am away at my home home visiting family.
Instead of going to the method we talked about last time lets go for a different route.
This is going to be using remote desktop, which you are going to have to make sure is enabled within your virtual machine.
How to enable remote desktop within windows XP:
How to Setup Remote Desktop on Windows XP
You will aslso make sure you can ping the host from your virtual machine and vise versa. Can you tell me if that is possible?
If not please check within your virtual switch this setting is ticked:
Right bring up run:
:winkey: + R
Then type in: MSTSC < press "ok"
Click "Show Options"
This will bring up more settings Remote Desktop Connections, in the Input field next to Computer input the IP address of your XP computer or the Computer name, then you can username - Example below:
Now click on the "Local Recourses" Tab:
Click "More"
Then highlight "Drives" and make sure that your USB/external hardrive is selected:
Click "OK"
Then click "Connect"
You may now get a message saying "Are you sure you want connect" going out on a limb you pressed connect, so click connect again
This will bring up a login page key in your credentials and click "OK"
Then you might have a message warning you about certificates, click "Yes"
Now I have logged in to the virtual machine and loaded up computer manager to show that it has mapped my local resources to the virtual machine. I also screen capped the host name so you can see it correlates to the rest of the screenshots:
I hope this works for you I am not able to test it in Windows 8 the only machine I am able to remote in to today is a Windows Server with Hyper-V
All the best!
Cheers,
Harry