Manual Mounting

You can mount the shared folder from inside a VM, in the same way as you would mount an ordinary network share:

In a Windows guest, shared folders are browseable and therefore visible in Windows Explorer. To attach the host's shared folder to your Windows guest, open Windows Explorer and look for the folder in My Networking Places, Entire Network, Oracle VM VirtualBox Shared Folders. By right-clicking on a shared folder and selecting Map Network Drive from the menu that pops up, you can assign a drive letter to that shared folder.

Alternatively, on the Windows command line, use the following command:
```
net use x: \\vboxsvr\sharename
```
While vboxsvr is a fixed name, note that vboxsrv would also work, replace x: with the drive letter that you want to use for the share, and sharename with the share name specified with VBoxManage.
In a Linux guest, use the following command:
```
mount -t vboxsf [-o OPTIONS] sharename mountpoint
```
To mount a shared folder during boot, add the following entry to /etc/fstab:
```
sharename   mountpoint   vboxsf   defaults  0   0
```
In a Oracle Solaris guest, use the following command:
```
mount -F vboxfs [-o OPTIONS] sharename mountpoint
```
Replace sharename, use a lowercase string, with the share name specified with VBoxManage or VirtualBox Manager. Replace mountpoint with the path where you want the share to be mounted on the guest, such as /mnt/share. The usual mount rules apply. For example, create this directory first if it does not exist yet.

Here is an example of mounting the shared folder for the user jack on Oracle Solaris:
```
$ id
uid=5000(jack) gid=1(other)
$ mkdir /export/home/jack/mount
$ pfexec mount -F vboxfs -o uid=5000,gid=1 jackshare /export/home/jack/mount
$ cd ~/mount
$ ls
sharedfile1.mp3 sharedfile2.txt
$
```
Beyond the standard options supplied by the mount command, the following are available:
```
iocharset CHARSET
```
This option sets the character set used for I/O operations. Note that on Linux guests, if the iocharset option is not specified, then the Guest Additions driver will attempt to use the character set specified by the CONFIG_NLS_DEFAULT kernel option. If this option is not set either, then UTF-8 is used.
```
convertcp CHARSET
```
This option specifies the character set used for the shared folder name. This is UTF-8 by default.

The generic mount options, documented in the mount manual page, apply also. Especially useful are the options uid, gid and mode, as they can allow access by normal users in read/write mode, depending on the settings, even if root has mounted the filesystem.
In an OS/2 guest, use the VBoxControl command to manage shared folders. For example:
```
VBoxControl sharedfolder use D: MyShareName
VBoxControl sharedfolder unuse D:
VBoxControl sharedfolder list
```
As with Windows guests, shared folders can also be accessed via UNC using \\VBoxSF\, \\VBoxSvr\ or \\VBoxSrv\ as the server name and the shared folder name as sharename.