Linux

VirtualBox 6 Ubuntu 16.04 Guest Upgrade to 18.04 – Shared Folder Not Working

Today, I finally decided to upgrade my local Ubuntu 16.04 VM to Ubuntu 18.04 which is the latest LTS version. Everything seem to be working just fine when I realized that the shared folders are not automatically mounted anymore.

Update: Breaks again after upgrading VirtualBox to 6.0.

My VM has been working so far and as far as I remember, I have this VirtualBox 6.0.4 version installed. When I upgraded it to 6.0.8, the VirtualBox addition service stops working. See details at the bottom of the post.

Original post

To make sure I didn’t miss any steps, after the upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04, I immediately re-installed the guest additions and restarted. I even tried to install virtualbox-guest-utils but it seems unnecessary.

Running the following seems to work though.

sudo systemctl restart vboxadd.service

However, after a reboot, the shared folder is still not automatically mounted.

After some long search for answers, I finally found the tweak needed. It turns out that I need to change the service configuration which causes the vboxadd-service.service to not run on startup, or so it seems.

Source: https://superuser.com/questions/1295025/virtualbox-folder-does-not-automatically-mount-windows-7-host-ubuntu-17-10-gu/1349958#1349958

If you are using the VirtualBox Guest Additions, run this:

sudo systemctl edit --full vboxadd-service

Then in the edit mode, remove the systemd-timesync.service from the Conflicts= line then reboot. I almost just copied and pasted it from the original article!

After the reboot, I can see again my shared folders. By the way, this is a Windows host and Ubuntu guest. That’s it!

VirtualBox 6.0.8 Update

After upgrading to VirtualBox 6.0.8, the VirtualBox addition service didn’t start. When I tried to manually start it, this is the error I got on the logs.

Starting vboxadd-service.service…
vboxadd-service.service: Failed to execute command:
No such file or directory
vboxadd-service.service: Failed at step EXEC spawning
/opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-6.0.6/init/vboxadd-service:
No such file or directory

It turns out that the init script is still pointing to the old version. I remember I manually edited it. It probably didn’t automatically updated the script during the upgrade since it notices I made some modifications. I’m forced to modify it again.

sudo systemctl edit --full vboxadd-service 

Then I pointed the paths into the new 6.0.8 version of VirtualBox scripts.

1 thought on “VirtualBox 6 Ubuntu 16.04 Guest Upgrade to 18.04 – Shared Folder Not Working”

  1. Hi,

    This was really useful to fix the issue. There is small typo in the service name. At least in my case the service name was with “d”, i.e.:
    systemd-timesyncd.service

    Thanks

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