Permission denied when accessing VirtualBox shared folder when member of the vboxsf group

I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 (guest) on Windows 7 (host) with the guest additions installed. I have an auto-mount folder that maps to my D: drive on the host which I can access using sudo ls /media/sf_D_DRIVE - however, even when my user (ross) is a member of the vboxsf group I get a permission denied error when attempting to explore it. I have restarted since adding my user to the vboxsf group.

This should work because I am a member of the group (which has rwx rights), so why doesn't it?

ross@panther:~$ ls -l /media total 8 drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 8192 2011-07-03 22:24 sf_D_DRIVE ross@panther:~$ ls -l /media/sf_D_DRIVE/ ls: cannot open directory /media/sf_D_DRIVE/: Permission denied ross@panther:~$ id ross uid=1000(ross) gid=1000(ross) groups=1000(ross),4(adm),20(dialout),24(cdrom),46(plugdev),112(lpadmin),120(admin),122(sambashare),1001(vboxsf) ross@panther:~$ sudo ls -l /media/sf_D_DRIVE/ total 84 drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 4096 2011-07-06 14:46 Development # ...snip... drwxrwx--- 1 root vboxsf 0 2011-05-25 19:13 Videos 

5 Answers

I had added my user to the vboxsf group:

sudo usermod -aG vboxsf $(whoami) 

I did do a restart, but after logging out and in again, I got access! Restarting after this and it still works. Go figure.

I followed this procedure: Check that your user account is in the vboxsf group. Click on the bird icon, select Users and Groups → Manage Groups → vboxsf → Properties. Your user account should have a checkmark next to it. Check it if it is unchecked. When prompted for a password, enter secret.

Then a restart on the virtual machine (Power of the Machine) and this allowed for the shared folder to work.

Apparently logging out is insufficient, which seems strange if it was just a matter of being a member of a group. However, this seems to do the trick, without a system reboot:

sudo usermod -aG vboxsf $(whoami) sudo systemctl restart vboxadd-service.service 

which suggests that it is not simply a matter of being a member of the appropriate group.

$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-dkms 

Go to your kali linux terminal then run the command below:

sudo usermod -a -G vboxsf (your-kali-username) sudo chown -R (your-kali-username):users /media/(your-share-folder-name) 

Below is a sample use:

sudo usermod -a -G vboxsf tahmid sudo chown -R tahmid:users /media/sf_pen_drive