Installing the Windows Guest Additions

In the Devices menu in the virtual machine's menu bar, has a menu item Insert Guest Additions CD Image, which mounts the Guest Additions ISO file inside your virtual machine. A Windows guest should then automatically start the Guest Additions installer, which installs the Guest Additions on your Windows guest.

For other guest operating systems, or if automatic start of software on a CD is disabled, you need to do a manual start of the installer.

For the basic Direct3D acceleration to work in a Windows guest, you have to install the WDDM video driver available for Windows Vista or later.

For Windows 8 and later, only the WDDM Direct3D video driver is available. For basic Direct3D acceleration to work in Windows XP guests, you have to install the Guest Additions in Safe Mode. See Known Limitations for details.

If you prefer to mount the Guest Additions manually, you can perform the following steps:

  1. Start the virtual machine in which you have installed Windows.

  2. Select Optical Drives from the Devices menu in the virtual machine's menu bar and then Choose/Create a Disk Image. This displays the Virtual Media Manager, described in .

  3. In the Virtual Media Manager, click Add and browse your host file system for the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso file.

    • On a Windows host, this file is in the installation directory, usually in C:\Program files\Oracle\VirtualBox.

    • On macOS hosts, this file is in the application bundle of . Right-click the icon in Finder and choose Show Package Contents. The file is located in the Contents/MacOS folder.

    • On a Linux host, this file is in the additions folder where you installed , usually /opt/VirtualBox/.

    • On Oracle Solaris hosts, this file is in the additions folder where you installed , usually /opt/VirtualBox.

  4. In the Virtual Media Manager, select the ISO file and click the Add button. This mounts the ISO file and presents it to your Windows guest as a CD-ROM.

Unless you have the Autostart feature disabled in your Windows guest, Windows will now autostart the Guest Additions installation program from the Additions ISO. If the Autostart feature has been turned off, choose VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe from the CD/DVD drive inside the guest to start the installer.

The installer will add several device drivers to the Windows driver database and then invoke the hardware detection wizard.

Depending on your configuration, it might display warnings that the drivers are not digitally signed. You must confirm these in order to continue the installation and properly install the Additions.

After installation, reboot your guest operating system to activate the Additions.