VirtualBox, problem mounting shared folder

[NoOp]

On 12/08/2011 08:40 AM, Colin Law wrote:
> I hope someone can help with mounting shared folders in VirtualBox
> (4.1.2).  I am using this for the first time, running a Precise
> virtual machine in Ubuntu 11.10 host.  I have installed the Guest
> Additions which seem to be working ok except that I cannot get shared
> folders to work.
> In the guest os I added the user to group vboxsf.
> In Devices > Shared Folders I added a share with path /home/colinl

Is this entire folder shared? That looks to me to be a home directory.
<http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#sharedfolders>

> (which is on the host) named it host_colinl, checked Auto mount and
> Make Permanent.
> I re-booted the guest.
> I see that it has correctly created the folder /media/sf_host_colinl
> but it shows as empty (even with sudo) and in nautilus it does not
> show the mounted icon on the folder.

I tested a shared folder on a Win7 host / 11.10 guest. The folder does
get mounted in /media (/media/sf_tempdir). I selected 'Read-Only' and
'Auto-Mount'. The problem is that the folder is owned by Root so I need
to use 'gksu nautilus' to browse it. And use 'sudo' with 'ls':

$ sudo ls -al /media/sf_<foldername>


> I removed the share from Devices > Shared Folders and added a new one
> with a different path and share name downloads.  This time I did not
> select auto mount.
> In a terminal in the guest I created /media/host_downloads then
> sudo mount -t vboxsf downloads /media/host_downloads
> and it says
> /sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device.
> 
> dmesg shows nothing at that point, nor does syslog.
> 
> Google has not helped me.  Any suggestions gratefully received.
> 
> Colin
>