virtualbox.org

I apologize if this has been asked, I did not find it searching the forums.
I am a VB newbie and this is a quick rundown of what I want to accomplish.
I used "genymotion" (don't know if thats a bad thing or not) to install a virtual xperia tablet on my windows 8.1 tablet.
This was accomplished pretty easily and works just fine. However I need to have a folder on the host (windows) which the guest (android) can access.
Did some googling and found what seemed like a fairly simple solution here: (Ok, so I cant post urls yet. the title of the article is "how-to-install-guest-additions-for-windows-8-1-in-virtualbox" by a guy called "fixedbyvonnie")
So it seems first thing I need to do is install "guest additions" into VB. I fired up VB (without using genymotion) started the VM, went to the "devices" menu and clicked "insert guest additions". That was the first issue to overcome as the xperia tablet has no CD to put the guest additions into.
So I closed down the VM, went back into VB, clicked "settings->storage" saw there was no CD and clicked the icon to add a new storage device to the current controller. It was left as a "nameless" device because I did not know what else to do.
This seemed to work ok though, I think. It did not create a CD drive as shown in the tutorial, but I was able to download the guest additions iso into the VB program directory.
At that point I was able to double click in the guest additions iso and see the install programs. Now I have a second issue I have not yet resolved. When the guest additions install program runs, it tells me it cant install on this version of windows (host, 8.1)

Can someone tell me how to just get a shared folder between my host and guest so that I dont have to spend days googling and going through tons of documents just to do something which seems like it should be quick and easy?!?
Thanks

Did a little more poking around. Looks like guest additions just does not work yet on windows 8.1 so I'm outta luck.
bummer

Look harder. There's no problem viz Win 8.1 and the GAs. Anyway I'm not sure what relevance the Win GAs have when talking about an Android guest - which is btw unsupported and has no GAs.

mpack wrote:Look harder. There's no problem viz Win 8.1 and the GAs. Anyway I'm not sure what relevance the Win GAs have when talking about an Android guest - which is btw unsupported and has no GAs.

Well, that was helpful.
I did do some looking and all I found were others saying that GA's wouldn't work on win 8.1. It certainly errors out when I try. While android may not be "officially" supported it is just a subset of Linux and many people have successfully set up android type VM's.

Google for "Android site:forums.virtualbox.org". I don't know what searching you already did, but that seems like an obvious thing to try. I've no idea where you landed on the notion that the GAs don't work on Win 8.1, unless it was from an old thread that predates Win8.1's release.

perry59 wrote:While android may not be "officially" supported it is just a subset of Linux and many people have successfully set up android type VM's.

I didn't say it was impossible to create an Android VM, in fact I've done it myself. I said there's no support from VirtualBox. The GAs for example will not work, and nobody will be interested in hearing that they don't work in an unsupported guest OS. Unless the paying market for Android-x86 improves, that situation probably won't change for at least a while.

After reading this I think the OP is really confused on where the GAs are installed.

@perry59,
Guest Additions = *GUEST* additions, and as such are installed in the guest not the host.