Can paratext on a windows guest OS store MyParatextFiles on a virtIO (shared with host) directory?

Question

My wife's laptop had a drive failure, recently, so I'm setting it up from scratch. After a few years' frustration running windows, she wants to go back to Linux for her main OS, but as a consultant she needs logos and a full copy of Paratext. Thus I've setting her up with windows as a KVM/QEMU guest.
I installed PT9.5 (latest) and it all ran OK. But so that she can e.g. print from ptxprint and easily share the generated files, It would, however, make life a lot easier if  her Paratext9Files were all on Z:  (which I've set up as a virtio drive shared with the host OS), so I uninstalled PT so I could change the Paratext dir.

All goes beautifully for getting resources, but when I try to send/receive projects I
confusingly, see that the list mentions some files as 'NEW' but others not, (all ought to be new, as it's a new directory!)
get the error: "Paratext.Data.Repository.HgCommandException File "mercurial.dispatch" in __getlocal"
Does anyone know if this is just telling me I need to do yet another clean-install (I tried reinstall with keep settings), or is there some fundamental issue that stops windows-mercurial from running on a linux-based filesystem?

Answer 1

A quick ChatGPT query makes me think this is a broader problem with Mercurial (the 3rd party mechanism PT uses to do S/R), and not just a PT issue. Specifically it said "Windows Mercurial assumes NTFS semantics", which confirms one of the guesses you were also thinking.

Is it possible to create a drive (or drive partition) that's formatted as NTFS, and then share that across both systems? In my limited experience Linux is much better about handling NTFS than Windows is handling other formats.

Answer 2

Answering my own question: mercurial doesn't work on virtio filesystems at the moment. (it won't even fail to crash if you ask for its help screen). So... not exactly.

In case there's someone this might be useful for, I can do this, which isn't perfect, but is almost what I want.
1. I move the c:\My Paratext9Projects\{project}\local to the Z: drive. (Z:\Paratext9Projects\{project}\local)
2.  then, using the windows command prompt (I don't know the  powershell equivalent) I type:
 mklink /J C:\Paratext9Projects\{project}\local  Z:\My Paratext9Projects\{project}\local 
(Note the inverted order relative to copy, unix ln, etc)
3.  I then install PTXprint on the windows (guest) machine.
 
Now PTXprint (on windows) can now access the Paratext directory (on windows) and will automagically write the resultant PDFs to the relevant bit of  linux's filesystem. As mercurial never touches {project}\local, it seems to be happy so far.