Cannot mount shared folders

[Jason]

This would appears to be a simple documentation fix (either the explanation needs fleshed out for new users, or the command simply needs changed).

The documentation states:

In a Linux guest, use the following command:
mount -t vboxsf [-o OPTIONS] sharename mountpoint

This does not work, you will get the following error

Only root can mount shared folders from the host.

Users need to be informed that they must be root (or have relevant admin rights) to do a mount. This simply means using "sudo" or "su" depending on your distro. When this is fixed, the command will still fail, but with a new error:

/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: Protocol error

To fix this, it seems you need to run a different command.

mount.vboxsf [-o OPTIONS] sharename mountpoint

This works.

I am not very familiar with Linux, so I am afraid I do not have the required knowledge to fully detail why this different command works, or how it may need to be issued on a different distribution (I used Ubuntu 8.10).

[lantonov]

I agree that the mount command needs to be run as sudo. I also ran into the "protocol error" message and it has two causes:

1. the mountpoint folder cannot have the same name as the sharename
2. the sharename has to be actually available (i.e. shared)

With those two conditions satisfied, the original mount command (sudo mount -t vboxsf sharename mountpoint) works fine. I am using VirtualBox 2.2.0 on Windows. It seems to me that this can entirely be described as user error (mien in this case :).

[Frank Mehnert]

As of VBox 3.1.8 this becomes a bit easier. Just create /etc/fstab entries in your guest and the directories will be mounted during boot.