How to fix virtualbox unknown filesystem type 'vbox'

Question

I want to make a virtual machine for web development on archlinux guest that acts like vagrant box. I don't want to use vagrant box because I want to learn how to do things on my own first and I want to keep the disk space used by the machine at minimum as possible. For this I have installed and configured apache2, php, mariadb with a total of 640M used on disk. I have forwarded guest 80 port to host 127.0.0.1:8080.

I encounter an error with the vboxfs module, I have installed virtualbox-guest-module as described here and after a machine reboot tried: mount -t vboxfs share_name mount_location and I get this error unknown filesystem type 'vbox'.

I have searched google and all the results make reference to the virtualbox-guest-utils from archlinux but the problem is I don't need all the dependencies that package has (alsa, xorg, video driver etc.) and I don't know witch deps I need or I don't need from that package... so I wander if it is possible and it is enough to use just the vboxfs module to be able to use the share functionality from Virtualbox.

Answer 1

You made a typo. It should be vboxsf instead of vboxfs. I did the same and was wondering why it doesn't work. So the full command is:

sudo mount -t vboxsf share_name mount_location

To remember the correct type you can think of it as the abbreviation of VirtualBox Shared Folder.