Comments on: Accessing Mac OS X harddrive from Ubuntu in VirtualBox via shared folders

By: Harry Wood

Harry Wood — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:30:32 +0000

I got this to work just now with VirtualBox 4.1.8. and ubuntu 11. Some notes:

* The ‘Devices’ menu appears when you’re running the guest virtual machine, and have it’s window open. If in fullscreen you get the ‘Devices’ menu down below (I was looking in the wrong place for a long time)
* As Jose says above, you can skip a few of these steps with the “Auto mount” option now provided by Virtual box: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#sf_mount_auto
* In the guest ubuntu (after a restart) this mounts the drive under /media, but you’ll get ‘permission denied’ until you add your user to the ‘vboxsf’ group. (And as an additional fun hurdle, the ubuntu 11 no longer comes with the gui tool to manage groups! To get pointy-clicky group config you can do: sudo apt-get install gnome-system-tools )

By: Aurea

Aurea — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 11:29:31 +0000

Thank you!!!

By: Jose

Jose — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 07:39:16 +0000

Hi there,

Very helpfull post, thanks!

Just wanted to add… from my experience…. once you installed the Guest Additions and created the shared folder, if you checked the auto-mount item in the configuration, the folder will be available in the “/media/sf_whatever_you_called_your_folder” directory.

Just creating a simlynk from there to wherever you´d like to place it, will avoid you the user id stuff and editing fstab.

Cheers.

Jose

By: Ali

Ali — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 21:57:28 +0000

I followed your steps . but I still was not able to share.

please your help

By: ondrej

ondrej — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 22:21:48 +0000

hi John,

thank you :)

what you refer as the “local_folder_name” is actually only a reference name or a label - provided for the hosted system by VirtualBox. only then the vboxsf file system type (a part of the VirtualBox’s Guest Additions) is able connect the label with a real directory on the hosted system - Ubuntu.

it can be described also as:
[OS X folder] -> [SHARED_FOLDER_NAME label] -> [Ubuntu MOUNTED_FOLDER]

so to use the example values mentioned in the blog entry above:
[/Users/ondrej/Pictures] -> [pictures] -> [/home/ondrej/share]

please, check the part III., especially step III.3, e.g.:
sudo mount -t vboxsf -o uid=USER_ID local_folder_name /tmp/here_i_am
connects the “local_folder_name” label with the real directory “/tmp/here_i_am” in Ubuntu.

i hope it works :)

By: John

John — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:31:03 +0000

Nice instructions.

In Ubuntu 11.04 I am having trouble finding my mounted folder.

1) I go into Devices->Shared Folders drop-down

2) I see …

Machine folders
local_folder_name /OSX/folder/shared Yes on auto Mount and Full on Access

3) But looking at my Ubuntu filesystem I am not finding “local_folder_name” anywhere

Have I left out something in the mounting process?

Thanks

By: jesustadeo

jesustadeo — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:32:14 +0000

Hey! thank you so much this is the best tutorial ever! ive been trying to do this since 2 weeks searching and searching.
Thank you so much again!
(;

Jesus

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 02:09:12 +0000

Thanks, this is very helpful as it includes correct information for mounting share folder with ability to write to share [maybe you could make this more explicit in the step for finding user id]. Also, can you include the last comment by Nickrud as a last step in the instructions for those that want to mount the folder on startup by editing fstab?
In any case, hard to find all this info in one place elsewhere. Good job!

By: nickrud

nickrud — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 22:30:25 +0000

Thanks for this - been a while since I’d done this and it was a very good reminder. A good answer to the ‘how to mount on virtual machine start’ is to add a line to /etc/fstab.

vbox /PATH/TO/SHARED/FOLDER vboxsf uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

will work just fine.

By: ondrej

ondrej — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:15:58 +0000

automatic mounting could be done as auto-starting the mount command:

1. create a script for mounting:
cat sudo mount -t vboxsf -o uid=USER_ID SHARED_FOLDER_NAME MOUNTED_FOLDER > /etc/init.d/vbox_automount

2. set permissions for the file to be executable:
chmod +x /etc/init.d/vbox_automount

3. to tell the system to start the script at boot (this is a linux distro dependent command - for ubuntu):
sudo update-rc.d vbox_automoun defaults

[not tested, sorry]