VirtualBox – How to Access Files from the Hosting Machine

shared-foldersvirtual machinevirtualboxwindows 7

I have a PC with Windows 7 Ultimate (A) running on it. From within that OS I have VirtualBox running another Windows 7 instance (B).

Is there any way for the Windows 7 (B) to access files from Windows 7 (A)? Ideally I'd like to be able to access them without having to copy them into the VM instance running because I don't have a big enough hard drive to do so… The hard drive has a folder with 1.5 TB of data (on a 2 TB hard drive), so copying it to a VM instance just wouldn't work.

Best Answer

There are several ways to accomplish this.

You can use VBox's own Shared folders feature.

For this: Go to Settings of the Virtual Machine and then select: Shared Folders.

Click on Add Shared Folder button. Specify folder path and folder name.

In Virtual Machine you go to \\vboxsrv\

you would see your folders.

You can also Create a network share and access that share from within B to A.

Related Solutions

Windows – Add custom Virtual Machine icons to VirtualBox

You can easily change the VM icon in the VirtualBox CLI by doing this command:

VBoxManage modifyvm  "VM Name" --iconfile D:\icon.png

How to copy files from a virtual machine to a local machine

If you want to use an SSH-server, try the following to set it up. I'm assuming your virtual machine doesn't need much security, as these instructions will open up root SSH logins for your guest machine. You could revert these changes when you're done.

I'm assuming the openssh server has already been installed.

Open up your openssh configuration file with your favourite text editor. If you're using vim for example:
```
sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config
```
Add to the bottom or make sure the lines below aren't commented out. If you don't use root but another user, ignore the first two lines:
```
PermitRootLogin without-password
PermitRootLogin yes
PasswordAuthentication yes
```
Save the new configuration file.
Restart the SSH server:
```
sudo restart ssh
```

Then simply connect to your guest machine using an SFTP client like FileZilla. Just enter the IP address, the details of your root (or other) user into the GUI and connect.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – Add custom Virtual Machine icons to VirtualBox

How to copy files from a virtual machine to a local machine

Related Question