Shared folder on Virtualbox Ubuntu 20.04 guest fails with “No such device or address”

Friday, February 26th, 2021

In an Ubuntu 18.04 virtual machine in VirtualBox, I could define a Shared Folder like so:

And then mount it like this:

mount -t vboxsf Projects -o uid=1000,gid=1000 /home/fboender/Projects/

Or with the equivalent fstab entry like this:

Projects /home/fboender/Projects/ vboxsf defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

This fails on an Ubuntu 20.04 guest with the following error:

/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: No such device or address

Some combinations I tried:

mount -t vboxsf /media/sf_Projects -o uid=1000,gid=1000 /home/fboender/Projects/
mount -t vboxsf Projects -o uid=1000,gid=1000 /home/fboender/Projects/
mount -t vboxsf sf_Projects -o uid=1000,gid=1000 /home/fboender/Projects/

None of it worked. It turns out that somehow, things got case-(in?)sensitive, and you need to specify the lower-case version of the Shared Folder name:

mount -t vboxsf projects -o uid=1000,gid=1000 /home/fboender/Projects/

Hope this saves someone somewhere some headaches, cause I couldn’t find anything about it on the Googles.