Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@estorgio

estorgio/Mounting VirtualBox shared folders on Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS.md

Last active March 8, 2024 17:34
Show Gist options
  • Save estorgio/1d679f962e8209f8a9232f7593683265 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save estorgio/1d679f962e8209f8a9232f7593683265 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Download ZIP
Mounting VirtualBox shared folders on Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS
Raw
Mounting VirtualBox shared folders on Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS.md

Update 28 July 2019: An updated version of this guide for Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS is now available. Feel free to check it out.

Update 23 May 2020: This guide is ALREADY OUTDATED and might no longer work with new versions of Ubuntu and VirtualBox. Please consider switching to the updated guide instead. I will no longer respond to the replies to this gist. Thank you.

Mounting VirtualBox shared folders on Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS

This guide will walk you through steps on how to setup a VirtualBox shared folder inside your Ubuntu Server guest. Tested on Ubuntu Server 16.04.3 LTS (Xenial Xerus)

Steps:

  1. Open VirtualBox

  2. Right-click your VM, then click Settings

  3. Go to Shared Folders section

  4. Add a new shared folder

  5. On Add Share prompt, select the Folder Path in your host that you want to be accessible inside your VM.

  6. In the Folder Name field, type shared

  7. Uncheck Read-only and Auto-mount, and check Make Permanent

  8. Start your VM

  9. Once your VM is up and running, go to Devices menu -> Insert Guest Additions CD image menu

  10. Use the following command to mount the CD:

sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom
  1. Install dependencies for VirtualBox guest additions:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`
  1. Run installation script for the guest additions:
sudo /media/cdrom/./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
  1. Reboot VM
sudo shutdown -r now
  1. Create "shared" directory in your home
mkdir ~/shared
  1. Mount the shared folder from the host to your ~/shared directory
sudo mount -t vboxsf shared ~/shared
  1. The host folder should now be accessible inside the VM.
cd ~/shared

Make the mount folder persistent

This directory mount we just made is temporary and it will disappear on next reboot. To make this permanent, we'll set it so that it will mount our ~/shared directory on system startup

  1. Edit fstab file in /etc directory
sudo nano /etc/fstab
  1. Add the following line to fstab (separated by tabs) and press Ctrl+O to Save.
shared	/home/<username>/shared	vboxsf	defaults	0	0
  1. Edit modules
sudo nano /etc/modules
  1. Add the following line to /etc/modules and save
vboxsf
  1. Reboot the vm and log-in again
shutdown -r now
  1. Go to your home directory and check to see if the file is highlighted in green.
cd ~
ls

If it is then congratulations! You successfully linked the directory within your vm with your host folder.

Bonus:

How to point apache's web directory to our folder in the host.

  1. Remove apache's old html directory (WARNING! Backup your data if necessary)
sudo rm -rf /var/www/html
  1. Add a symbolic link in its place
sudo ln -s ~/shared /var/www/html
@timothy
Copy link

timothy commented May 21, 2019

I am using VertualBox 6 and Ubuntu 18.04. I do not see a checkbox that says "Make Permanent" as stated in step 7. On step 10 I get "mount: /media/cdrom: mount point does not exist." error, and on step 15 I get "/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: Protocol error" error. Let me know if anyone knows what went wrong. Thanks!

@sagrawal-idrc
Copy link

sagrawal-idrc commented May 31, 2019 •
edited

Host: Windows Server 2012 R2
Guest: Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS

I had to additionally install following to get the shared folder mounted:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-dkms

After rebooting, the shared folder appears under /media; vboxadd-service.service still fails for me though.

@nuistzhou
Copy link

Well, according to the chosen answer here, you could just skip steps 9 - 13 if the guest OS is Ubuntu, this works well when host OS is either Windows or Mac OS.

@sliawatimena
Copy link

Dear all,

Host: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Guest: Windows 10 Pro
VirtualBox 6.0.10

After I issue this command twice
$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-dkms
I got make it permanent tick box. However in my Windows E: is a cdrom drive, not a harddisk as expected.

How to correct this? Thank you very much in advance.

Warmest Regards,
Suryadi

@estorgio
Copy link
Author

estorgio commented Jul 28, 2019 •
edited

Hi everyone,

I just posted an updated version of this guide for Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS. Feel free to check it out.
https://gist.github.com/estorgio/0c76e29c0439e683caca694f338d4003

@sagrawal-idrc @sliawatimena
This guide only works with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. If you're using the newer Ubuntu 18.04 LTS then please see the updated version of the guide.

@teyfix
Copy link

teyfix commented Sep 16, 2019

sütü seven kamyoncu <3

@wewark
Copy link

wewark commented Mar 12, 2020

  1. Add the following line to fstab (separated by tabs) and press Ctrl+O to Save.
    shared /home/<username>/shared vboxsf defaults 0 0

Doing so lead to the machine booting in emergency mode, It loads normally when I remove it.

@maxphere
Copy link

maxphere commented Mar 18, 2020 •
edited

my ubuntu VM cannot start after running the steps of "Make the mount folder persistent". How to recover back?

@mortezasabihi
Copy link

image

if i save like this, i get an error after reboot. what is wrong?

@hdoggiedawg
Copy link

Thanks! I had forgotten about installing the Guest Additions from CD. After step 9, I didn't have to do anything else, as VirtualBox 6.0.16 automatically ran the installation script (VBoxLinuxAdditions.run) and mounted the shared folder. Caveat: Mac host, Ubuntu Desktop 16.04.1 guest.

It doesn't seem to use the /etc/fstab file, as there was no entry for the shared folder. But the mount command shows
/home/justin/mydocs on /home/justin/mydocs type vboxsf (rw,nodev,relatime,iocharset=utf8,uid=0,gid=999,dmode=0770,fmode=0770,tag=VBoxAutomounter)

@hdoggiedawg
Copy link

hdoggiedawg commented Apr 2, 2020 •
edited

Spoke too soon. It seems there's an extra step related to permissions, for some reason (see https://www.howtogeek.com/187703/how-to-access-folders-on-your-host-machine-from-an-ubuntu-virtual-machine-in-virtualbox/). The mount folder is owned by root:vboxsf and has permissions 770, so you have to add yourself to the vboxsf group.
sudo adduser $USER vboxsf
and reboot.

@yxsongbo
Copy link

yxsongbo commented Apr 3, 2020

the text file can't write by gedit ,but can write by LibreWriter

@abdes-zakari
Copy link

abdes-zakari commented Apr 9, 2020 •
edited

After running this command : sudo mount -t vboxsf shared ~/shared
i get this error :

/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device or address

@benjaoming
Copy link

@abdes-zakari

I had the same issue on 16.04 after successfully installing Guest Additions .iso, not sure why it didn't start. Instead of installing the Guest Additions .iso, I used packages from Ubuntu repositories and it worked:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-dkms
sudo service virtualbox-guest-utils start

@tonyp7
Copy link

tonyp7 commented May 21, 2020

I prefer to add it as a inside crontab -e:

@reboot mount -t vboxsf shared home/user/shared

So you dont mess with fstab

@Perl99
Copy link

Perl99 commented May 23, 2020

Note that your VirtualBox might be too old for the Ubuntu version. I have installed 20.04 on VirtualBox 5.2.x and the mounting failed. It started working after upgrading to 6.0

@AlexLX4773H
Copy link

Thank you very much for this , am using VirtualBox 6.1 and Ubuntu 20.04, and it works great.

@Danielgb23
Copy link

This breaks my ubuntu VM

@Danielgb23
Copy link

This breaks my ubuntu VM

It's because I was using
shared /home//shared vboxsf defaults 0 0
with "shared" instead of the name of my folder in the host

@cpawamgit
Copy link

Host: Windows Server 2012 R2
Guest: Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS

I had to additionally install following to get the shared folder mounted:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-dkms

After rebooting, the shared folder appears under /media; vboxadd-service.service still fails for me though.

Hi, this solved my problem, thanks. How did you find this answer ?

@HansKappert
Copy link

HansKappert commented Mar 8, 2021 •
edited

  1. Add the following line to fstab (separated by tabs) and press Ctrl+O to Save.
    shared /home/<username>/shared vboxsf defaults 0 0

Doing so lead to the machine booting in emergency mode, It loads normally when I remove it.

Did you substitute with the name of your user account?

@vijaybnotion
Copy link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-teQnZ8LEY
Follow this beautiful tutorial from youtube. (this is part 10, please watch part 9 as well)

@saurav-chandra
Copy link

saurav-chandra commented Jul 7, 2021 •
edited

VirtualBox version: 6.1.22 r144080 (Qt5.6.2)
Host: Windows 10 Enterprise 1909
Guest: ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Description:
followed all the steps, it is working in other ubuntu versions, but not with the one i have
I am getting error in the mount step itself....
on running this command: sudo mount -t vboxsf ShareVM ~/Desktop/ShareVM
getting error: /sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: Invalid argument
any idea what to do?

@Koi-foo
Copy link

Koi-foo commented Jul 17, 2021

VirtualBox version: 6.1.22 r144080 (Qt5.6.2)
Host: Windows 10 Enterprise 1909
Guest: ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Description:
followed all the steps, it is working in other ubuntu versions, but not with the one i have
I am getting error in the mount step itself....
on running this command: sudo mount -t vboxsf ShareVM ~/Desktop/ShareVM
getting error: /sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: Invalid argument
any idea what to do?

You are mounted in root space.
Use the full path from the root, for example /home/USER/ShareVM. The ShareVM directory must exist. If you plan to upload files, the user must be granted permissions.

@stefanlduplessis
Copy link

Worked for me to the T. Thank you so much for a comprehensive and easy to follow guide.

@masadcv
Copy link

masadcv commented May 19, 2022 •
edited

Host: Ubuntu 20
Guest: Ubuntu 22

This worked perfectly - Many thanks for the guidance!

@alaa-shubbak
Copy link

how did you solve it?
I faced the same, my VM is broken and i don't know how to fix it.
should i try to delete it and reinstall it again?!

@Danielgb23
Copy link

Danielgb23 commented Aug 23, 2022 via email

@psravi
Copy link

psravi commented Aug 25, 2022

This worked perfectly.
Host: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Guest: Windows 10 Pro
VirtualBox 6.1.36

@berbawy
Copy link

berbawy commented Jan 3, 2023

Brilliant !!
These steps solved the common mounting issue I face using vagrant

/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment