Lost Internet access in guest, can't get bridge connection

[Bcarrigg90]

I'm fairly new to virtualbox and to Linux, so bear with me, but here is my issue.

I am trying to set up a home server in virtualbox using Ubuntu 12.4 as the guest, and Windows 7 professional as the host. I had Internet working originally in the guest. I had the connection bridged in Windows so that the guest system was presented to the router as a separate machine, it had its own ip, I could connect to the server from outside networks, everything was peachy.

I attempted to add my external hard drive as a shared folder so the guest system could access it. I don't know if that could be the cause of all of this, but that's when I lost all Internet connectivity to the guest.

I have tried to delete and recreate the host-only adapter in virtualbox preferences, And every time I close the preferences and reopen it, the ip and network mask are reset to 0.0.0.0 and 0.0.0.0. I cannot give it an ip manually, it just resets to all zeros.

I have tried disabling the bridged adapters, reenabling them, updating drivers, restarting the host Windows machine, everything I can think of. What else can I try?

Also, when I restart the windows machine, Network connectivity is lost entirely on the computer until I run network diagnostics and it resets the ethernet adapter.

[Bcarrigg90]

I can't seem to get any network connections of any kind to work.

For bridged networking, should I select bridged networking in virtualbox and then select my Ethernet adapter? Or should I bridge the Ethernet adapter with a host-only adapter in Windows, then tell virtualbox to use the host-only adapter?

[mpack]

Host-only networking is, strangely enough, for communication with the host. Only.

The easiest networking mode to use is NAT. Bridged will work if you bridge to a host NIC, you have a router, and you haven't tried to use static addressing.