Virtualbox: Windows 7 Host, Linux Mint Guest - Shared Folder Mounting Woes

Question

For the love of me, I can't seem to manually mount my raid array as a shared folder into a Linux Mint guest. Another internal hard drive mounts just fine, but this particular item has been damned difficult.

It does automount just fine, but I have far too many issues with the permissions (even with my user added to the proper group) to have it be useful. For instance, persistent 403 issues with files symlinked into /var/www/html...

Conditions:

• Windows 7 64-bit Host
• Linux Mint 17.3 64-bit Guest

• The folder that does mount properly via a manual command in fstab uses the following command:

  mount -t vboxsf -o rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 Data /home/systemsready/VMData

• Yet this command:

  mount -t vboxsf -o rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 RAID /home/systemsready/RAID

nets me this error message every time:

/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such file or directory

• The latest virtualbox version is installed in the host.

• The latest virtualbox guest additions is installed in the guest.

• Putting a modprobe line before it, as per many MANY help results on the internet, does not make the command work.

The only thing I can think of was that I came across a bug report from about 8 years ago, in which trying to manually mount a whole drive (for instance...my raid's E:/) would fail. But surely it wouldn't still be in play now, right? ...right?

The shared folder I have no problems manually mounting has the following items:

• Machine: Data

• Folders: D:\Data

• Auto-mount: Yes

• Access: Full

It is an internal drive.

The shared folder that I can't manually mount has the following items:

• Machine: RAID

• Folders: E:\

• Auto-mount: Yes

• Access: Full

It is connected to the computer via a USB3 cord. My USB keyboard and mouse both work within the guest, so I doubt it's a USB problem.

I've spent the last hour going through numerous help topics and they all seem to enumerate the same steps - steps that don't work for me, like modprobe etc etc. I'm hoping that I can come across someone with the same problem as me who can help!

Answer 1

I had a similar problem with a Linux guest mounting to a Windows 7 host

I was mounting a bit differently:

sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.60.20/online /var/www/online -o username=MyUser,password=MyPassword,uid=33,gid=33,rsize=32768,wsize=32768

But I don't think Linux was the issue though, so the following fixes to Windows host registry helped:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"LargeSystemCache"="1"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters]
"Size"="3"

Also check https://superuser.com/a/865002/228767