Virtualbox shared folder mac os

With the shared folders feature of Oracle VM VirtualBox, you can access files of your host system from within the guest system. This is similar to how you would use network shares in Windows networks, except that shared folders do not require networking, only the Guest Additions. Shared folders are supported with Windows 2000 or later, Linux, and Oracle Solaris guests. Oracle VM VirtualBox includes experimental support for Mac OS X and OS/2 guests.

Shared folders physically reside on the host and are then shared with the guest, which uses a special file system driver in the Guest Additions to talk to the host. For Windows guests, shared folders are implemented as a pseudo-network redirector. For Linux and Oracle Solaris guests, the Guest Additions provide a virtual file system.

To share a host folder with a virtual machine in Oracle VM VirtualBox, you must specify the path of the folder and choose a share name that the guest can use to access the shared folder. This happens on the host. In the guest you can then use the share name to connect to it and access files.

There are several ways in which shared folders can be set up for a virtual machine:

In the window of a running VM, you select Shared Folders from the Devices menu, or click on the folder icon on the status bar in the bottom right corner.

If a VM is not currently running, you can configure shared folders in the virtual machine’s Settings dialog.

From the command line, you can create shared folders using VBoxManage , as follows:

There are two types of shares:

Permanent shares, that are saved with the VM settings.

Transient shares, that are added at runtime and disappear when the VM is powered off. These can be created using a checkbox in the VirtualBox Manager, or by using the —transient option of the VBoxManage sharedfolder add command.

Shared folders can either be read-write or read-only. This means that the guest is either allowed to both read and write, or just read files on the host. By default, shared folders are read-write. Read-only folders can be created using a checkbox in the VirtualBox Manager, or with the —readonly option of the VBoxManage sharedfolder add command.

Oracle VM VirtualBox shared folders also support symbolic links, also called symlinks , under the following conditions:

The host operating system must support symlinks. For example, a Mac OS X, Linux, or Oracle Solaris host is required.

Currently only Linux and Oracle Solaris Guest Additions support symlinks.

For security reasons the guest OS is not allowed to create symlinks by default. If you trust the guest OS to not abuse the functionality, you can enable creation of symlinks for a shared folder as follows:

4.3.1.В Manual Mounting

You can mount the shared folder from inside a VM, in the same way as you would mount an ordinary network share:

In a Windows guest, shared folders are browseable and therefore visible in Windows Explorer. To attach the host’s shared folder to your Windows guest, open Windows Explorer and look for the folder in My Networking Place s, Entire Network , Oracle VM VirtualBox Shared Folders . By right-clicking on a shared folder and selecting Map Network Drive from the menu that pops up, you can assign a drive letter to that shared folder.

Alternatively, on the Windows command line, use the following command:

While vboxsvr is a fixed name, note that vboxsrv would also work, replace x: with the drive letter that you want to use for the share, and sharename with the share name specified with VBoxManage .

In a Linux guest, use the following command:

To mount a shared folder during boot, add the following entry to /etc/fstab :

In a Oracle Solaris guest, use the following command:

Replace sharename , use a lowercase string, with the share name specified with VBoxManage or the VirtualBox Manager. Replace mountpoint with the path where you want the share to be mounted on the guest, such as /mnt/share . The usual mount rules apply. For example, create this directory first if it does not exist yet.

Here is an example of mounting the shared folder for the user jack on Oracle Solaris:

Beyond the standard options supplied by the mount command, the following are available:

This option sets the character set used for I/O operations. Note that on Linux guests, if the iocharset option is not specified, then the Guest Additions driver will attempt to use the character set specified by the CONFIG_NLS_DEFAULT kernel option. If this option is not set either, then UTF-8 is used.

This option specifies the character set used for the shared folder name. This is UTF-8 by default.

The generic mount options, documented in the mount manual page, apply also. Especially useful are the options uid , gid and mode , as they can allow access by normal users in read/write mode, depending on the settings, even if root has mounted the filesystem.

In an OS/2 guest, use the VBoxControl command to manage shared folders. For example:

As with Windows guests, shared folders can also be accessed via UNC using \\VBoxSF\ , \\VBoxSvr\ or \\VBoxSrv\ as the server name and the shared folder name as sharename .

4.3.2.В Automatic Mounting

Oracle VM VirtualBox provides the option to mount shared folders automatically. When automatic mounting is enabled for a shared folder, the Guest Additions service will mount it for you automatically. For Windows or OS/2, a preferred drive letter can also be specified. For Linux or Oracle Solaris, a mount point directory can also be specified.

If a drive letter or mount point is not specified, or is in use already, an alternative location is found by the Guest Additions service. The service searches for an alternative location depending on the guest OS, as follows:

Windows and OS/2 guests. Search for a free drive letter, starting at Z: . If all drive letters are assigned, the folder is not mounted.

Linux and Oracle Solaris guests. Folders are mounted under the /media directory. The folder name is normalized (no spaces, slashes or colons) and is prefixed with sf_ .

For example, if you have a shared folder called myfiles , it will appear as /media/sf_myfiles in the guest.

The guest properties /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/SharedFolders/MountDir and the more generic /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/SharedFolders/MountPrefix can be used to override the automatic mount directory and prefix. See SectionВ 4.7, вЂњGuest PropertiesвЂќ.

Access to an automatically mounted shared folder is granted to everyone in a Windows guest, including the guest user. For Linux and Oracle Solaris guests, access is restricted to members of the group vboxsf and the root user.

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VirtualBox Guest Additions with Shared Folders for Linux Virtual Machines on Mac OS X

In order to access certain aspects of a virtual machine in VirtualBox, you will need to install Guest Additions (similar to VMWare Tools I guess)

There is a manual page for installing Guest Additions but not all of it is self-explanatory…

First you need to log into your Linux virtual machine (VM) and install/configure x, y and z.

Install DKMS

This part is relatively straightforward, just install using whatever package manager your Linux distribution has. The below example uses APT that comes with Debian-based distros:

Where to find VBoxGuestAdditions.iso

Usefully Oracle don’t tell you in their guide, but it is available with the rest of the downloads at http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/

You need this image to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions themselves onto your VM, so you can either download it to your Linux VM and mount it there, or (which is what I did) download it to your Mac OS X host and mount it in the DVD drive using the VirtualBox Manager.

How to mount the image

You need to mount the image on the Linux VM, so that you can install VirtualBox Guest Additions from it. If you have mounted it in the VirtualBox Manager in the DVD drive then you will still need to mount it in the Linux VM; Since I can’t remember the last time I had to mount something in *nix from the command-line, here’s a quick way.

Then you should see VBoxLinuxAdditions in that directory, which you need to run as per the manual. If the above doesn’t work it might be because your DVD drive in VirtualBox is called something else, like dvd (instead of dvd1) which probably differs depending on which distro you’re using.

Then you need to run the installer.

Once that’s done you can restart.

Everything should be finished now installation/configuration-wise, but you might encounter some problems… (otherwise skip to Mount the host folder)

Kernel header problems

I got some missing kernel header problems when trying to install Guest Additions, which if building the main Guest Additions module fails will be logged.

If you see something like this…

So you can do just that!

Hopefully this should install now (although the XFree86 bit will fail, assuming you’re using the command-line) and you may need to restart the VM, although I’m not sure.

Mount the host folder

You can create the host folder in the VirtualBox Manager in the Shared Folders tab on the Settings for that VM. If you add it on the command-line it’ll appear under the machine folders anyways. If you want to type it though, here’s what you’d type into the Mac OS X terminal (note this is the only thing that you’d type into the host itself)

To mount the Shared Folder from within the guest, the instructions from Ubuntu (as my guest is Ubuntu, although I think this is a better way to mount it anyways) were very useful.

Just change the target to be wherever you want the Shared Folder to be mounted in the guest. Now in theory if you go to that path in the guest, it should be the same as the directory you shared from the host!

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Ryan Sechrest

Web Application Developer • Game Player • Rock Climber • Cocktail Crafter • 3x Tough Mudder Finisher

This is mainly for my own reference, but here it goes.

In VirtualBox, click your OS on the left and click on Settings.
Click on the Shared Folders tab.
Click on the folder with the plus on the right.
Browse to a folder of your choice in the folder path.
Enter a folder name with no spaces e.g. “Share”.
Check Auto-mount and Make Permanent, if available.
Click on OK.

2. Mount the folder in the guest OS

Create a folder in your guest OS that you want to share.
Open up Terminal.
Type in id and press ENTER— remember that ID.
Switch to the root user using sudo su and enter your password.
Browse to the etc folder using cd /etc .
Edit the rc.local file using vi rc.local .
Move your cursor right above exit 0 and press the letter “i” on your keyboard to insert text.
Type in the following: sudo mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000,gid=1000 Share /home/username/Documents/Share
- 1000 should match the ID you noted down earlier.
- Share should match the folder name from step 1.
- username should match your Linux username.
- /Documents/Share should be the absolute path of the new folder you created.
Now hit “ESC”, type :wq and hit ENTER to save and quit the file editing.

After you restart the guest OS, your shared folder will be automatically mounted.

Thanks! This really helped me, too.

I went through everything you explained in 1. By 2 I got stuck. can anybody help me please??

I’m totally lost when it comes to “2. Mount the folder in the guest OS”. I’m using mac – sierra as a host and windows 10 in Virtual box. I’m stuck from point 2.2 “open up Terminal” onwards. What is Terminal? How do I move on to the rest. DO you by any chance has a picture as an example to summarise these steps? Many thanks in advance for your help.

Thanks for the instructions!

I needed to make 2 small changes in order to get shared folders to work with my Linux guest:

In VirtualBox VM shared folder settings, do not enable Automount.
As root on Linux guest, do chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.local without which the rc.local commands will not be executed.

Nice! Thank you for sharing that!

I followed every step correctly.

Where do i check if it shared in guest OS?

I believe it’s mounted as a disk, so you can use the file explorer that came installed with the guest OS.

hello, i followed all the steps correctly but i still cant see me “shared” folder mounted anywhere what should i do?

Excellent writeup. Worked like a charm.
Thank you so much for the tip.

Very helpful. For those who might not see the files in the shared folder, try from terminal
ls /home/username/Documents/Share and now if you see the data but not in the file viewer, then go to /home/username/Documents/Share in the file viewer and on the top menu go to view tab and select reload folder or F5.

If you want to add a user to a group in Fedora, do the following:

Open a terminal.
Enter su — , hit Enter.
Enter the root password, hit Enter.
Type in usermod -a -G vboxsf username , replacing username with the user you want to add to the group, hit Enter.
You may have to reboot to remount the share, the easiest way to do this is probably to reboot the VM.

This is really helpful!! Thank you very much ! 🙂

thanks – works great.
addition:
to find your shared folder run df -H
in my case it’s mounted on /media/sf_NAME

Works great. Just one note, look for links to rc.local and make sure the file has the execute permission.
In my case: sudo chmod +x rc.d/rc.local

This worked like magic. Thanks.

In addition to the above steps I had to install GuestAdditions using `sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-utils`

Great article. Very helpful. Comment from @Fabregas finally helped to get it done. Thanks a lot!

Hi I tried to mount the file to my guest OS (Mac OS Sierra) but I got a blue screen when I tried to restart the Ubuntu OS (it is Ubuntu 16.04). Do you know why this might be happening?

Worked like charm! host: macos and guest: ubuntu.

Thanks a lot, Tried hard to share and found this, both Bidirectional Drag & Drop and Clip board sharing were not working. This really helped a lot.

Worked on Mac in which I am running Linux VM! Thanks.

Hi ,
Its not working for me I have MAC book laptop and running Centos VM . Pls help

Thanks a lot! This is the only way that makes my Mac work.

Thank you! It really helped me!

I am not sure I could follow your instruction well.
How can I verify that rc.local running without any error?
Could you help print screen rc.local as reference? since your topic match to my condition.
I use Oracle Linux 6 (Guest) with Mac OS (Host)

Dear Friend, it is working for me after I fixed by install Guest Additional CD successfully.
If anyone who did has problem with Guest Addition CD like virtualbox additions module not loaded
For my case I run this command:
# yum install kernel-uek-devel.x86_64
# /sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup all
and Then restart your guest os.
after login with user that map in rc.local, share folder will appear on user desktop.

Thank you for coming back to provide the solution!

Totally late for this post, but glad I found it!

Using Catalina (Host) to Mojave(Guest). After some testing, I realized that I didn’t have to change the rc.local file at all.

– I got this to work by changing Network Adapter (specifically, adapter 1) settings related to VB specific, Mojave (Guest) preferences in VirtualBox Manager area.
– Under “attached to” change from Default NAT to Bridged Adapter & for “name” dropdown, used the very first: en0: Wifi (Airport) which produced an “192 .etc.etc.etc” (IP) in place of the “10.etc.etc.etc” for the default connection in the Guest , re: Ethernet. Makes sense.
– SMBed to Mojave(Guest) VB env via Catalina (Host, my non-virtual environment) using the Finder->Go->Connect to Server

Thanks for posting newer information with regard to setting this up!

Very helpful writeup. The tips in the comments helped a lot as well. Thanks everyone.

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Virtualbox shared folder mac os