Wednesday 16 December 2009

VBox Shared Folders OEL5.4

Mounting VBox shared folders with an Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.4 Guest running in Windows XP requires the Guest Additions to be installed. This is done from the machine drop down in VBox with the Guest running followed by setting the host location and a name e.g. transfer from the VBox console.

Having installed these, as root you can issue the following commands to mount the host filesystem to a guest filesystem.

  1. guest> mkdir /home/transfer ## this creates the guest directory to which you are going to map the host filesystem
  2. guest> mount -t vboxsf transfer /home/transfer ## this is normally done as root
This will mount the filesystem, but does not persist over a reboot, if you wish to have this automounted, append the following line to /etc/fstab

transfer /home/transfer vboxsf defaults 0 0

On reboot this generates an error, saying device not found, but still mounts the filesystem from the host. At this point, I suspect it's due to the order in the boot when it tries to mount it being before the VBox additions are enabled. Still investigating cleaner solution.