With Emacs running on Windows (without cygwin) I am able to open a remote (windows share) directory with C-x C-f //IPADDRESS/d$ RET command. With Emacs on cygwin, I tried /smb:IPADDRESS:/d$$ RET. However, I got the below error message,
Host 'IPADDRESS' looks like a remote host, 'smb' can only use the local host.
The earlier //IPADDRESS/DIR syntax too didn't work.
Can anyone please help (I also tried using my username in the smb URL but got the same error)?
EDIT: I found out from the post https://superuser.com/questions/102233/how-to-go-to-remote-directory-in-cygwin that cygwin treats UNC paths as local. More information is at https://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#unc-paths. So the solution is to do C-x C-f //machine/shareddir RET to browse the remote directory assuming you don't have to provide different credentials.