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Experts. I've successfully installed VMware tools for Ubuntu. Everything seems to work fine, but shared folders were not mounted automatically.
How do I get them to work?

If I run vmware-hgfsclient in terminal, I get the list of shared folders, but ls -l /mnt/hgfs is empty. Actually there's no hgfs dir in /mnt. I know I should probably use the vmware-hgfsclient tool, but I realy don't know how.

P.S. I wouldn't ask if I could understand the vmware-hgfsclient help I've read.

Any suggestions?

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@Mods, could someone create the 'shared-folders' and 'vmware-tools' tags ? – V-Light Mar 6 '11 at 17:23

7 Answers

up vote 16 down vote accepted

I have set up on Windows 7 host with Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop with VMware Tools installed on.

Virtual Machine settings

  • Folder sharing = Always Enabled
  • Make sure you have at least one Folder shared between the host and guest

On the Ubuntu Guest

  • check /mnt/hgfs that you can access your shared folder.

    If you don't see your shared folders (automounted) inside /mnt/hgfs , run VMware configuration tools:

    sudo vmware-config-tools.pl

  • update your fstab using the details below:

    gksu gedit /etc/fstab

    (I am using ubuntu desktop so use other text editor to enter the next line at the end of the file)

    .host:/{shared-folder} /{path-to-mount-on} vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

  • Restart your vm (You may need to restart few times or get error message saying unable to mount just skip the error and restart)

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1  
with {shared-fodler} you mean the NAME or something else ? For instance, if I'll run vmware-hgfsclient i'll get hst_dwnloads and hst_ebooks. So I should use on of them? so for hst_ebooks it should look like: .host:/hst_dwnloads<white-space>/mnt/hgfs/ vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0 or not ? – V-Light May 11 '11 at 9:10
@V-Light if you cd /mnt/hgfs/ then ls -a you'll see that share folders are auto mounted there. When you do sudo mount -t vmhgfs .host:/hst_ebooks ~/hst_ebooks this will mount hst_ebooks into your home directory. What you might be wanting to do is making is easy for you to use shared folders for that try above. – Azizur May 11 '11 at 20:32
that's the problem. There's NOTHING in /mnt/hgfs/ The dir ist empty. – V-Light May 11 '11 at 21:46
@V-Light take a look at How to Share folders with your Ubuntu Virtual Machine (guest) – Azizur May 12 '11 at 9:17
@Aizur, the guide didn't help. But after 'cleaning' (uninstalling open- and 'normal'-vmwaretools) I was finally able to install open-vm-tools and mount shared folders. Thank you for you advice with fstab – V-Light May 12 '11 at 22:56
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up vote 8 down vote

run vmware-config-tools.pl, AGAIN!

Refer: http://www.laotudou.com/vmware-player-share-folder.html

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2  
Simple as that, and it worked just fine! – ysap Sep 25 '12 at 19:29
vmware-config-tools.pl is not available if using open-vm-tools from Ubuntu-Software-Center or compiled from source from sourceforge. In that case user must use vmware-hgfsmounter as @snth describes in his answer. It may be possible to use open-vm-toolbox, tools and components for VMware guest systems (GUI tools) package from the Ubuntu software repository – Mark Mikofski Jan 3 at 21:13
up vote 1 down vote

I've been having the same problem but I think I have just been able to make some progress.

Type vmware-hfgs and then press the <Tab> key which will show you that there is also a vmware-hgfsmounter command. If you call that without any options it will print some help that shows you how to call this as part of the `mount' command. Using that info I then ran the following which worked for me:

cd /mnt
sudo mkdir win7share
sudo mount -t vmhgfs .host:/win7share /mnt/win7share

I was then able to access the Win 7 share and copy files to and from there.

If you want to make this permanent then I suspect that you will need to edit the /etc/fstab file but I can't help you there yet.

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If i execute sudo mount -t vmhgfs .host:/hst_ebooks /mnt/hgfs/hst_ebooks i get an Error: Error: cannot mount filesystem: No such device – V-Light May 11 '11 at 9:29
Have you created the /mnt/hgfs/hst_ebooks mount point? I think in my case /mnt/hgfs already existed and in case there were any special event handlers watching that directory I rather created a directory under /mnt directly. Therefore try sudo mkdir /mnt/hst_ebooks and then try running the command again. – snth May 12 '11 at 7:21
sudo vmware-hgfsmounter <host:sharename> <dir> runs the same commands as sudo mount -t vmhgfs <host:sharename> <dir> where <sharename> is vmware-hgfsclient – Mark Mikofski Jan 3 at 5:41
up vote 1 down vote

I had a similar problem. The folder /mnt/hgfs/ appeared back again when I assured that open-vm was uninstalled. As follows

sudo apt-get purge open-vm-tools
sudo apt-get purge open-vm-dkms

and reinstalled vmware-tools

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up vote 1 down vote

(applies to Mac VMware Fusion and Ubuntu file sharing) When you are asked in vmware-config-tools.pl about whether you want HGFS, say yes! (The default is 'no' and you may have skipped over it when hitting enter/return). This should give you /mnt/hgfs after the tools are installed.

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up vote 1 down vote

this worked for me:

cd /mnt
sudo mkdir hgfs
sudo vmware-hgfsmounter .host:`vmware-hgfsclient` /mnt/hgfs

assuming of course that I had already enabled a shared folder from the host machine in vmware player settings

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up vote 0 down vote

You need to install the VMWare tools first, after that the vmware-config-tools can be used globally. For a more detailed guide, you can see here.

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