Sharing a Folder to a vBox Linux Guest

I’m just setting up some VirtualBox sandboxes for testing a software release, and I’ve had a hell of a time getting a folder shared from my ArchLinux host to my Ubuntu 10.4 guest.

Everyone will tell you to share the folder either with the vBox gui or with the VBoxManage command. Then they give you the proper mount command for the guest:

sudo mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000,gid=1000 share mountpoint/

But for me this failed with error:

/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device

Reboot was no help.

Conclusion? Reinstall the Guest Additions.

Runs like a charm. 😉