[SOLVED] : mount.vboxsf: mounting failed......

[TrotskyIcepick]

....with the error : protocol error.

I'm running Fedora 15 as guest on a Vista host. I have shared the folder e:\downloads\Linux, in the VirtualBox shared folders dialog I have shared this as LinuxDownloads.

Now, when I try to mount this share using sudo mount -t vboxsf /LinuxDownloads /home/andrew/Downloads I get the error:

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

If I then try sudo mount -t vboxsf LinuxDownloads /home/andrew/Downloads I get the following:

/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: Invalid argument

I want eventually to auto mount the share using rc.local but until I can manually mount the share this wont be possible.

I have seen various similar posts here but nothing seems to help. The guest additions installed OK after doing the following:

sudo yum update kernel
sudo yum install kernel-devel kernel-headers
sudo yum install gcc

I'm at a complete loss as to what to do next.

[Perryg]

What version of VirtualBox?
Have you rebooted?
did you tell VBox to auto-mount the share?

[TrotskyIcepick]

Hi Perry, thanks for responding.

My VirtualBox version is v4.0.8, and no I haven't told VB to auto-mount the share (though it does work when selected, I don't want to mount it to /media/sf_LinuxDownloads, so I turned it off).

I have rebooted several times.

I think this must be something peculiar to Fedora 15 as I previously had an installation of Ubuntu and that worked fine using the same command.

[Perryg]

Turning it off does not always release it for some reason. delete the share and try again.

[TrotskyIcepick]

Unfortunately that made no difference. When VirtualBox auto-mounts the shared folder, how is it doing it? It would seem I need a different command to do it?

[Perryg]

Auto-mount adds the share in media as a type of drive (like a CD). If you look you will see a new group in the guest called vboxsf which you would need to add the guests users login name to. As for the reason you are having issues with the manual mount, I don't know the reason. The only things that I have seen cause this are missing guest additions or trying to manual mount a share that was set to auto-mount.

[TrotskyIcepick]

Drat The user is already a member of the vboxsf group so that shouldn't be the issue, and guest adds were installed without a hitch. Guess I'll need to do some trolling around the net/forums.

As far as other things I require are concerned such as the ability to manage MySQL on the guest from the host, this has been a cinch requiring some iptables and firewall configs, but works just great which is an indicator that the guest adds are working as advertised.

Will let you know how I get on.

Thanks

[TrotskyIcepick]

Found this post http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.p ... 06818.html didn't quite understand a lot of it but for the hell of it decided (without much hope) to try the last poster's suggestion. Therefore I added the following to my fstab file:


LinuxDownloads /home/andrew/Downloads vboxsf rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

Low and behold, it worked a charm. I still got errors when trying a manual mount, but since auto-mount was what I needed I don't have to worry about that.

Thanks Perry for your input.