virtualbox.org

Is there a way to create and use a shared folder without restarting the guest VM?

That depends on the guest OS. Which one requires a restart? I don't recall that, e.g., any Windows guest does.

I believe that is the auto-mount one that requires a restart of the guest to actually work. Oh and the user name being in the vboxsf group on Linux.

I couldn't find a decent answer to this on the web. This post shows up as the second hit on google for "virtualbox mount shared folder without reboot".

So I thought I'd add this little impossible to find nugget:

systemctl restart vboxadd-service.service

And magically the newly added virtualbox shared folders appear without a reboot. (Test on Centos 7)

Thanks @poleguy, good to know!