title: Grant IIS Express permission to access network drive in VMWare
body: <p>I have a Windows 7 virtual machine in VMWare that I'm using to develop ASP.NET MVC 5 Web applications with the default IIS Express server. I like to keep my projects saved on an external hard drive which I can access in the virtual machine through a shared folder / network drive. However, when I run my applications, IIS Express cannot access my web.config files in the project directory. It's looking in the right folder so I'm pretty sure this is a permissions issue. How can I grant IIS Express file access to the files on my network drive?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Things I've tried</strong></p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Running Visual Studio as an administrator</li>
  <li>Setting iisexpress.exe to always run as an administrator</li>
  <li>Looking around in the applicationhost.config file</li>
  <li>Attempting to set write permissions on the network drive (right click on the drive and go to properties but no "Security" tab available)</li>
  <li>A few other things that I can't remember that I tried during the hours of searching for a solution</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p><strong>Known last resorts that I'd prefer to avoid</strong></p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>Copying the project files from the external hard drive to the VM's storage space and vice versa </p></li>
  <li><p>Running the projects on a full IIS server</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p><strong>Other things to know</strong></p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>Using Visual Studio 2013 and MVC 5</p></li>
  <li><p>Using IIS Express 7.5</p></li>
  <li><p>VMWare Workstation 11</p></li>
  <li><p>The virtual machine is also on the external hard drive, so I can't connect the usb to the guest, I need to access the rest of the hard drive through shared folders (although doubtful, maybe partitioning the hard drive would fix this?)</p></li>
  <li><p>Guest OS is Windows 7 Professional</p></li>
  <li><p>Host OS is Debian Jessie RC1</p></li>
  <li><p>External HDD is formatted as NTFS, although it shows up as HGFS on the network drive</p></li>
  <li><p>I can read and write to files on the network drive, it's just IIS Express that is having trouble</p></li>
  </ul>