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I accidentally hide the main Toolbar from my VirtualBox Manager UI? In my ubuntu 12.04 .

enter image description here Can anyone let me know the detail steps to display the Toolbar again? I search the whole blogs but can't figure it out!

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8 Answers 8

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To re-enable the Toolbar right-click on the bottom line, then select and tick the Show Toolbar entry on the pop-up menu:

enter image description here

Do not disable both, the toolbar, and the statusbar.

When running Unity desktop the only way to restore them is to manually edit the VirtualBox.xml file located in ~/.config/VirtualBox or ~/.VirtualBox.

Search for the following lines

 <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/Statusbar" value="false"/>
 <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/Toolbar" value="false"/>

to replace "false" with "true".

Please make a backup of this file before you edit it, as all informations on your VMs are stored there as well. No instance of Virtual Box or VirtualBoxManager must run on editing this file because it will be overwritten otherwise.

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  • Thanks! Great Help, Been trying to get this back for months now Aug 22, 2017 at 0:17
  • For VirtualBox 6.0.08 another annoying stuff: (close VirtualBox, backup xml data file first always) <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/SplitterSizes" value="916,0"/> set value non zero, for example: <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/SplitterSizes" value="313,603"/> Dec 4, 2019 at 22:56
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I understand your frustration. It's very user unfriendly that you can remove the toolbar by right clicking it, and are seemingly supposed to right-click it again to view it, which isn't possible because it's invisible. :)

You can right-click the status bar and show the toolbar from there. If you've chosen to hide both the statusbar and the toolbar, then it's kinda difficult in Ubuntu, using Unity and Global Menus. If you're using som other desktop than Unity or you're using Unity and have deactivated Global Menus, then you can right-click the menubar to get the same options as you get on the toolbar and statusbar.

If you want to fix it manually, then you can open ~/.VirtualBox/VirtualBox.xml in GEdit or something. Then locate VirtualBox/Global/Extradata and add <ExtraDataItem name="GUI/Toolbar" value="true" />. That should work, although you might possibly have to restart VirtualBox.

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  • @minertz029, can you explain how you accomplished that? Kinda rude to edit my post without educating me, methinks! :) Jan 15, 2014 at 17:47
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    Another option is just Right Clicking the Top Menu Bar option(i.e. File, Machine, Help) also shows the same Options Thanks for help!
    – Milson
    Jan 18, 2014 at 2:44
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    Aha! That doesn't apply to Unity users, though. But I'll edit my answer to add that part. Good tip! Jan 19, 2014 at 16:55
  • NOTE: You need to have VirtualBox closed when you edit the config file, or else VB will overwrite your change when you close it to reload the config file (unfortunately, speaking from experience XD) Aug 28, 2015 at 18:07
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In Windows (and hopefully in Ubuntu, too) you can open the menu using your host key + Home key. From there you can access the "view" option to activate the menu/status bar again.

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If you still have status bar: right click

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In VirtualBox 5.1 (running on Windows, it's probably the same on Ubuntu) I found that you can get this back by clicking Settings (in the main VirtualBox Manager window) for the relevant machine, and select User Interface in the left pane list. There you have check boxes for toggling the visibility of these bars. (Note that you can also toggle which specific items should be shown in menus and the status bar.)

Screenshot

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Try Ctrl/Host + C it actually works, It's temporary but it works, it will show you the menu bar .

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Tested on UBUNTU GNOME (17.04) host and Win7 guest:

HOST+Home-button works perfectly, since it pops up a menu from which you can reset/configure the view of Menu and Status bars.

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You can also check a config for certain workstation located in [machine_name].vbox file in your machine directory. This file seems to override global VB config.

There are following two flags

<ExtraDataItem name="GUI/MenuBar/Enabled" value="false"/>
<ExtraDataItem name="GUI/StatusBar/Enabled" value="false"/>

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