After installing a Linux ( Ubuntu or CentOS ) or Windows in Oracle VirtualBox, you should want to enable the copy & paste function between the virtual machine and the host machine. This article will tell you how to do it.
1. Prerequisite.
- First, you should start the virtual machine.
- Then click Devices —> Insert Guest Additions CD image… menu item to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions software in your virtual machine OS.
- If you install Linux on the virtual machine, you may meet an error during the above process, you can read the article How To Resolve VirtualBox Guest Additions: Kernel Headers Not Found For Target Kernel Error to learn how to fix it.
- If you install Windows on the virtual machine, you may find there is nothing happened like the above Linux virtual machine.
- For Windows guest virtual machine, it will add the VirtualBox Guest Additions in the guest virtual OS CD drive. You can click the CD drive to open it then click the VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe file to install the guest additions.
- After install the guest additions, you need to restart the guest OS to enable it.
2. Enable Copy & Paste ( Share Clipboard ), Drag & Drop Between Oracle VirtualBox Virtual Machine And Host Machine Steps.
- Right-click the virtual machine in VirtualBox.
- Then click Settings… menu item in the popup list.
- Then click the Advanced tab in the General settings window.
- Select Bidirectional item in the Shared Clipboard drop-down list.
- You can also select the Bidirectional item in the Drag’n Drop drop-down list.
- You can also click Devices —> Shared Clipboard —> Bidirectional , Devices —> Drag and Drop —> Bidirectional menu item to configure above settings.
- If you still can not copy files between host and guest virtual machine, you can read the article How To Share Folders Between Virtualbox Host And Guest Virtual Machine to share the files between the host and guest virtual machine to copy the files between them.
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