Empty Home Directory in Windows Using Boot Camp 3.0

Just got Snow Leopard and installed Boot Camp 3.0 on Windows? Boot Camp 3.0 is definitely a well welcomed update. The trackpad works much better now with 2 finger tap for secondary click, it finally works like in OS X. Even better, you can now access HFS+ without third party apps in Windows. Definitely nice for Windows 7 x64 users that MacDrive doesn’t even support. But one problem that seems to trouble people in the forums is that navigating to /Users/[yourname] in Windows shows an empty folder. You can’t access your music or pictures or anything from Windows.

One possibility is the presence of a .Xauthority file in your $HOME directory. Delete the file and you may access your home directory in Windows. Remember that running X11 will recreate the file. Delete it again.

To automate the whole process, consider creating a script that lets you boot into Windows worry free.

tell application "Finder"
	if exists file "~/.Xauthority" then
		delete file "~/.Xauthority"
	end if
end tell
do shell script "bless -mount /Volumes/[your Windows device]/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly" with administrator privileges
do shell script "shutdown -r now" with administrator privileges

Put this in AppleScript editor and save it as a .app to make it executable. You can manpage the bless command for more options. You can also change the icon like any other app. At that point, you can invoke this via QuickSilver and a GUI dialog will prompt you for password.

It’s also possible that there are no .Xauthority files in the subdirectories so simply type in explorer the subdirectories to access them directly. ie: D:/Users/[you]/Desktop