Mapping local drives or folders onto Oracle VM VirtualBox

Virtualization is a boon that many of us take for granted…It allows us to play with systems without impacting an existing OS…Especially for the geeks and nerds out there or for anyone with a passion to break down things on computer systems, virtual systems are the best thing that has ever happened (this is obviously after Unix…Oh sweet Unix…) 

Well, in this blog I will show you how to map a local drive or folder so that it is visible in your Virtual box… I am using Oracle Virtual Box and will be sharing a folder from my C: drive onto the Guest OS which happens to be Windows 64…

I am assuming that you already have configured a virtual machine.

The first thing that you need to do is on the Oracle VM VirtualBox screen, go to devices->Insert Guest Additions CD image. This is shown in the below screenshot.

Once this is done, you will see a new Device under the “Devices witth Removable Storage” as shown in the below screenshot.

 

Double click on this to start the installation of the Oracle VM guest additions…The snapshots of this is shown below. I have used the default options to do the installation.

Once the installation of the VM VirtualBox Guest Additions is complete, the installer will ask for rebooting the guest operating system. Click on the Finish button to reboot the system.

Once the guest operating system has rebooted, go to “Devices” -> “Shared Folders” -> “Shared Folder Settings” as shown in the below snapshot.

Click on the “Add” button as shown in the below snapshot.

Choose the folder from the host operating system that you want to share on the Virtual machine. In my case I am sharing the folder “C:\Hyperion\” with the virtual box, with “Auto-mount” and “Make Permanent settings” enabled as shown in the below snapshot.

 

 

Once you click the OK button, the folder should be listed under “Machine Folders” as shown in the below screenshot. 

Once the folder has been mapped, you can restart the system to display the shared folder from local system onto the virtual box. If it does not work, follow the below steps to map the drive manually.

You need to map the drive inside the guest operating system manually. To do that go to run and type the below command as shown in the below snapshot:-

net use X: \\vboxsvr\<FOLDERNAME>

After running the above command, you should see the mapped folder under the Network drives as shown in the below snapshot.

Now just to cross check that this feature actually works, below is a screenshot of my local C:\Hyperion folder and the corresponding folder on the Virtual Box.