virtualbox.org

Running Virtual box host on Windows 7. I use a common shared folder for all my VM's. Recently I installed Debian 8.2.0 as a quest and when signed in as root I have access to the shared folder (read/write). But when signed in using any other account than root I do not have permission to access the shared folder.

In Debian the shared folder belongs to user root and group vboxsf. Even know the folder belongs to root I can not change the folder permissions using chmod 777 to open the folder up to everyone. The chmod command completes without error, but the shared folder permissions do not change. Any idea how to open this folder up to all users? I prefer not to use root for everyday tasks.

root@Debian-VM:/media# ls -al
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jan 9 22:34 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 Jan 9 20:20 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 Jan 9 20:19 cdrom -> cdrom0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 9 20:19 cdrom0
drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 4096 Jan 16 15:58 sf_VMshare
root@Debian-VM:/media# chmod 777 sf_VMshare/
root@Debian-VM:/media# ls -al
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jan 9 22:34 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 Jan 9 20:20 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 Jan 9 20:19 cdrom -> cdrom0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 9 20:19 cdrom0
drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 4096 Jan 16 15:58 sf_VMshare
root@Debian-VM:/media#

From the user manual, Ch. 4.3.2:

Note: Access to auto-mounted shared folders is only granted to the user group vboxsf, which is created by the VirtualBox Guest Additions installer. Hence guest users have to be member of that group to have read/write access or to have read-only access in case the folder is not mapped writable.

Thanks... Adding group vboxsf to non-root users solved my problem.