Accessing partition inside VirtualBox running Ubuntu

Question

How to map local partition / folder / drive with assigned letter like windows. This is useful to access from virtual machine installed within Ubuntu with virtualbox.

Answer 1

Accessing your folder from your host (Ubuntu) with a guest operational system should not be very difficult.

The tools are supplied by VirtualBox to allow sharing of folder without having to rely on network sharing protocols like samba of nfs.

Of course all of this depends on the host and on the guest but normally involves 3 steps:

• Install the guest additions for the guest system, supported systems are: Windows, Linux, Solaris or OS/2

• From the guest VirtualBox window go to Devices > Shared Folders and on the new window click on the green + button to add a folder/drive from your host to the mounting points list

• Third and last step is from within the guest system to mount the share you just created using the specific commands inside the guest system to mount them. Ie, for windows that would be something like pressing the Win+R keys and typing net use x: \\vboxsvr\sharename. Your host's sharedname folder would then be mounted as drive letter x: inside your windows guest.

Answer 2

Here is a tutorial that shows how to share a folder:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/share-ubuntu-home-directories-using-samba/

More details on this page:

http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/install.html#smbconfminimal