Cannot see shared folder on VBox

After I re-installed Vbox on one of my servers I had a problem where I could not see a shared folder on my guest machine (XP).

The command to set the share is quite simple:

VBoxManage sharedfolder add “[machine]” -name "[share_name]" -hostpath \n "[/home/username/foldertoshare]"

If you issued this command but you still cannot see the share, the solution is actually simple. All you have to do is re-install Guest Additions (if you haven't done so), reboot the machine and you are set.

You can find more information and thank the guy who found this here.


Vic.

Useful VBox commands

For those of you that are running VBox on a server (headless), here are some common used commands that you will most likely need.

Change memory to 256MB

VBoxManage modifyvm "[machine]" -memory "256MB"

Register an ISO image

VBoxManage registerimage dvd [/full/path/to/iso.iso]

Add ISO image to machine after registering

VBoxManage modifyvm "[machine]" -dvd [/full/path/to/iso.iso]

Start Machine

VBoxHeadless -startvm "[machine]" -p [port] &

Change state of machine

VBoxManage controlvm [machine] poweroff VBoxManage controlvm [machine] reset VBoxManage controlvm [machine] savestate

** Other “controlvm” options
pause|resume

Set a shared folder

VBoxManage sharedfolder add “[machine]” -name "[share_name]" -hostpath \n "[/home/username/foldertoshare]"

Vic.

VirtualBox - XP NIC Driver problem

After installing VirtualBox on my laptop with Ubuntu 8.04 I ran into the problem were the virtual NIC on my XP machine did not have the proper drivers installed, and I was not able to update the driver using the standard Windows drivers.

The description for the device was “AMD PCNET Family PCI Ethernet Adapter”.

After doing a search on the net I found a couple of people having the same problem. Their solutions was to install either an Intel driver or an AMD:

Intel
AMD

The problems I had was that the AMD driver did no get recognized by the device, and the Intel driver did no recognize the device. That's when I stumbled on the “proper” device. You can download it here.

Install the executable on your virtual machine and then do a driver update on the network card under Device Manager. This should automatically recognize the device and give you network access.


More info:
VirtualBox Forum