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Experts. I've successfully installed VMware tools for Ubuntu. Everything seems to work fine, but shared folders were not mounted automatically.
How do I get them to work?

If I run vmware-hgfsclient in terminal, I get the list of shared folders, but ls -l /mnt/hgfs is empty. Actually there's no hgfs dir in /mnt. I know I should probably use the vmware-hgfsclient tool, but I realy don't know how.

P.S. I wouldn't ask if I could understand the vmware-hgfsclient help I've read.

Any suggestions?

Braiam
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V-Light
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  • The steps in this article http://www.wingfoss.com/content/how-to-install-vmware-tools-on-debian-ubuntu-centos followed by vmware-config-tools.pl worked for me. – jchook Jul 20 '15 at 17:16
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    with open-vm-tools installed, you should use vmhgfs-fuse for that, see #1 answer in this question: https://askubuntu.com/questions/580319/enabling-shared-folders-with-open-vm-tools – TingQian LI Apr 28 '19 at 02:00
  • I have created a new Q&A for newer Ubuntu-s. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1350352/how-do-i-mount-shared-folders-in-ubuntu-version-18-04-using-vmware-tools – TFuto Jul 06 '21 at 13:37

14 Answers14

218

Most other answers are outdated. For Ubuntu 18.04 (or recent Debian distros), try:

sudo vmhgfs-fuse .host:/ /mnt/hgfs/ -o allow_other -o uid=1000

If the hgfs directory doesn't exist, try:

sudo vmhgfs-fuse .host:/ /mnt/ -o allow_other -o uid=1000

You may have use a specific folder instead of .host:/. In that case you can find out the share's name with vmware-hgfsclient. For example:

$ vmware-hgfsclient
my-shared-folder
$ sudo vmhgfs-fuse .host:/my-shared-folder /mnt/hgfs/ -o allow_other -o uid=1000

If you want them mounted on startup, update /etc/fstab with the following:

# Use shared folders between VMWare guest and host
.host:/    /mnt/hgfs/    fuse.vmhgfs-fuse    defaults,allow_other,uid=1000     0    0

I choose to mount them on demand and have them ignored by sudo mount -a and the such with the noauto option, because I noticed the shares have an impact on VM performance.

Requirements

Software requirements may require installing the following tools beforehand:

sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop

Others have claimed the following are required:

sudo apt-get install build-essential module-assistant \
  linux-headers-virtual linux-image-virtual && dpkg-reconfigure open-vm-tools

Official Article

How to configure VMware Tools Shared Folders Linux mounts (60262)

Hrishikesh Kadam
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con-f-use
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I have set up on Windows 7 host with Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop with VMware Tools installed on.

Virtual Machine settings

  • Folder sharing = Always Enabled
  • Make sure you have at least one Folder shared between the host and guest

On the Ubuntu Guest

  • check /mnt/hgfs that you can access your shared folder.

    If you don't see your shared folders (automounted) inside /mnt/hgfs , run VMware configuration tools:

    sudo vmware-config-tools.pl

  • update your fstab using the details below:

    gksu gedit /etc/fstab

    (I am using ubuntu desktop so use other text editor to enter the next line at the end of the file)

    .host:/{shared-folder} /{path-to-mount-on} vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

  • Restart your vm (You may need to restart few times or get error message saying unable to mount just skip the error and restart)

cwallenpoole
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Azizur Rahman
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    with {shared-fodler} you mean the NAME or something else ? For instance, if I'll run vmware-hgfsclient i'll get hst_dwnloads and hst_ebooks. So I should use on of them?

    so for hst_ebooks it should look like: .host:/hst_dwnloads<white-space>/mnt/hgfs/ vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

    or not ?

     – V-Light May 11 '11 at 09:10
  • @V-Light if you cd /mnt/hgfs/ then ls -a you'll see that share folders are auto mounted there.

    When you do sudo mount -t vmhgfs .host:/hst_ebooks ~/hst_ebooks this will mount hst_ebooks into your home directory.

    What you might be wanting to do is making is easy for you to use shared folders for that try above.

     – Azizur Rahman May 11 '11 at 20:32
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    that's the problem. There's NOTHING in /mnt/hgfs/ The dir ist empty. – V-Light May 11 '11 at 21:46
  • @V-Light take a look at How to Share folders with your Ubuntu Virtual Machine (guest) – Azizur Rahman May 12 '11 at 09:17
  • @Aizur, the guide didn't help. But after 'cleaning' (uninstalling open- and 'normal'-vmwaretools) I was finally able to install open-vm-tools and mount shared folders. Thank you for you advice with fstab – V-Light May 12 '11 at 22:56
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    Re-running sudo vmware-config-tools.pl was enough for me. – ysap Sep 25 '12 at 19:30
  • +1 - I had to install the vmware tools by clicking on the VM menu on vmware workstation. – Malachi Jun 11 '13 at 14:02
  • @V-Light how did you "clean"? I'm having similar problems that re-running the config aren't solving. – travis Jan 30 '14 at 23:32
  • It seems the vmhgfs module does not compile against the 3.13 kernels (e.g. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS). So make sure to check for errors in the vmware-config-tools.pl output. Source: https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches/issues/4 – Johannes Rudolph Jul 06 '14 at 09:44
  • My share folder is in /mnt/hgfs/ , and my host folder is C:/xampp/htdocs/thesharefolder. So how do I type thìs : .host:/{shared-folder} – trogne Nov 24 '16 at 16:33
  • I want to mound the folder in "~" directory instead of "/mnt/hgfs". In the meantime, is use a symbolic link : ln -s /mnt/hgfs/thesharefolder ~/ – trogne Nov 24 '16 at 16:47
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    adding this line broke my installation, and I spend half hour to revert the issue. – Nezir Nov 28 '16 at 14:55
  • E: Package 'gksu' has no installation candidate. Where does it come from? – tomchiukc Dec 25 '21 at 08:12
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run vmware-config-tools.pl, AGAIN!

Refer: http://www.laotudou.com/vmware-player-share-folder.html

William
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ltd911
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[UPDATE 2017-05-18] This answer is outdated for Ubuntu newer than 15.10 (Wiley). The executable vmware-hgfsmounter has not been available in Ubuntu since 16.04LTS (xenial). Although, hgfsmounter may still be available on other Linux distributions, since the hgfsmounter function is still currently available in the upstream source code on GitHub. If anyone has updated information, please comment or edit this answer, instead of down-voting, as I believe this answer may still be valid for older Ubuntu releases.

This answer also assumes that you are not using VMWare Tools from VMWare but instead using open-vm-tools from your Linux distribution. VMWare decided to support this switch in 2015. See KB2073803. Therefore this answer also assumes that your version of Ubuntu can install the open-vm-tools from it's software repository.

OUTDATED FOR UBUNTU > 15.10 (Wiley)

This worked for me using open-vm-tools from Ubuntu Software Center (trusty-14.04LTS shown - please see update above):

cd /mnt
sudo mkdir hgfs
sudo vmware-hgfsmounter .host:/`vmware-hgfsclient` /mnt/hgfs

assuming of course that I had already enabled a shared folder from the host machine in VMware Player settings.

Note that vmware-hgfsclient returns the list of shared folders that are enabled in the VMware Player settings. This function is available for both open-vm-tools and vmware-tools.

Also note that vmware-hgfsmounter is equivalent to

mount -t vmhgfs .host:/win7share /mnt/hgfs

or to adding to your /etc/fstab file

.host:/win7share /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults 0 0

But the vmware-hgfsmounter function is not available using the official vmware-tools from VMware that ships with the current VMware player. Therefore, as the currently accepted answer suggests, running the vmware-config-tools.pl -d fixes the problem.

Mark Mikofski
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    Gave an error "share name is invalid". This syntax worked, however: vmware-hgfsmounter .host:/<Share-Name> /mnt/hgfs is simply the name of the share as configured in VMWare – Alexander Rechsteiner Nov 19 '13 at 15:03
  • Thanks @AlexanderRechsteiner. Your syntax is probably better as it is more general. FYI, backticks around commands expand the command so since vmware-hgfsclient returns the "share name", then \vmware-hgfsclient``, uses the returned "share name" as the argument for vmware-hgfsmounter. if you're getting "share name is invalid" try running vmware-hgfsclient and seeing what "share name" it returns. It may be a list, and that might be the problem. – Mark Mikofski Nov 19 '13 at 17:38
  • @AlexanderRechsteiner Thanks for spotting that I had missed the file system seperator / in the host share! – Mark Mikofski Nov 22 '13 at 17:40
  • Error: cannot canonicalize mount point: No such file or directory – IgorGanapolsky Dec 07 '14 at 21:49
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    @IgorG. Create the folder first with mkdir /mnt/hgfs, then it works. – sja Aug 31 '15 at 15:20
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    vmware-hgfsmounter does not exist with the most recent Ubuntu open-vm-tools package (Ubuntu 16.04, open-vm-tools 10.0.7). – Jason Jun 15 '16 at 14:40
9

I had a similar problem. The folder /mnt/hgfs/ appeared back again when I assured that open-vm was uninstalled. As follows

sudo apt-get purge open-vm-tools
sudo apt-get purge open-vm-tools-dkms

and reinstalled vmware-tools

Jason
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Peretz
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  • Great point, I needed this after having uninstalled the vmware-tools manually and dkms was the one still providing some kernel modules. – 0ff Apr 07 '15 at 17:53
  • Uninstalling and reinstalling is a "windows newbie recipe", not a good practice. – Soleil May 25 '18 at 10:12
7

I had this exact problem. It turned out IT had installed some old version of VMWare tools with non-functioning vmhgfs kernel module.

My solution was to run the configuration with the clobber-kernel-modules setting to overwrite the existing vmhgfs module.

 sudo vmware-config-tools.pl -d --clobber-kernel-modules=vmhgfs

The -d selects all the defaults for you (remove it if you don't want the defaults).

jobin
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extabgrad
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  • After an Ubuntu upgrade that broke my sharing, an hour of trying lots of various things failed...but it was the clobber-kernel-modules=vmhgfs that finally made it work again. – John Fultz Nov 01 '14 at 20:30
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open-vm-tools would NOT build kernel modules until I first installed linux-headers-virtual (paired with linux-image-virtual of course). as soon as I installed the headers package, dpkg-reconfigure open-vm-tools resulted in successfully building and loading the kernel modules, specifically the vmhgfs module.

pjs
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  • I purged my installed open-vm-tools, installed the linux headers and image packages you mentioned, then reinstalled the vmtools. I still do not have a loaded vmhgfs module nor can I load one (it doesn't exist). I cannot get the shared files to work with the open-vm-tools packages. I'm going to try the manual install of vmware tools mentioned in other answers. – Jason Jun 15 '16 at 15:57
  • This worked great with Ubuntu 16.4.1. No vmware tools needed, just those three packages and dpkg-reconfigure followed by shared folders disable / enable cycle from vmware settings. – Kalle Pokki Jul 30 '16 at 14:06
  • packages linux-headers-virtual and linux-image-virtual do not exist anymore. – Oleg Rudenko Jan 13 '17 at 21:19
6

vmware-tools-patches worked for me; give this a shot if nothing else works

I've tested this on a fresh install (easy install) of ubuntu 16.10 on vmware workstation 12 pro

  1. Go to https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches

  2. Follow the Quickest Start instructions given there. Reproduced here: 

    $ git clone https://github.com/rasa/vmware-tools-patches.git
$ cd vmware-tools-patches
$ ./patched-open-vm-tools.sh
Elder Geek
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Dheeraj Bhaskar
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  • vmware-tools-patches worked for me also on Ubuntu 17.10 development release. But I followed the instructions found on the vmware forums: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/509898 – ADreNaLiNe-DJ Aug 01 '17 at 05:14
5

I've been having the same problem but I think I have just been able to make some progress.

Type vmware-hfgs and then press the <Tab> key which will show you that there is also a vmware-hgfsmounter command. If you call that without any options it will print some help that shows you how to call this as part of the `mount' command. Using that info I then ran the following which worked for me:

cd /mnt
sudo mkdir win7share
sudo mount -t vmhgfs .host:/win7share /mnt/win7share

I was then able to access the Win 7 share and copy files to and from there.

If you want to make this permanent then I suspect that you will need to edit the /etc/fstab file but I can't help you there yet.

snth
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  • If i execute sudo mount -t vmhgfs .host:/hst_ebooks /mnt/hgfs/hst_ebooks i get an Error: Error: cannot mount filesystem: No such device – V-Light May 11 '11 at 09:29
  • Have you created the /mnt/hgfs/hst_ebooks mount point? I think in my case /mnt/hgfs already existed and in case there were any special event handlers watching that directory I rather created a directory under /mnt directly. Therefore try sudo mkdir /mnt/hst_ebooks and then try running the command again. – snth May 12 '11 at 07:21
  • sudo vmware-hgfsmounter <host:sharename> <dir> runs the same commands as sudo mount -t vmhgfs <host:sharename> <dir> where is vmware-hgfsclient – Mark Mikofski Jan 03 '13 at 05:41
4

You need to install the VMWare tools first, after that the vmware-config-tools can be used globally. For a more detailed guide, you can see here.

stephenmyall
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Trung-Hieu Le
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3

(applies to Mac VMware Fusion and Ubuntu file sharing) When you are asked in vmware-config-tools.pl about whether you want HGFS, say yes! (The default is 'no' and you may have skipped over it when hitting enter). This should give you /mnt/hgfs after the tools are installed.

jobin
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If you can't still mount shared folders after installing vmware-tools, here is the resolution.

Previously, I couldn't mount windows shared folder after installing vmware tools. I didn't see any folders under /mnt/hgfs.

Finally, I got resolved this share folder mounting issue by installing open-vm-dkms.

Here are steps:

  1. Ensure configured shared folder in VMWare Player

  2. Install open-vm0dkms:

    sudo apt-get install open-vm-dkms

  3. Hit the "Enter" all the way to allow default value

  4. Mount Windows shared folder to Ubuntu VM:

    sudo mount  -t  vmhgfs  .host:/     /mnt/hgfs

  5. check if mounting is successful

    df -kh

    You should see:

    .host:/         57657252 50247088   7410164  88% /mnt/hgfs

    Also check again if any folders under /mnt/hgfs. You should see folders under which.

  6. Auto mount shared folder on startup

    There is a startup script called “open-vm-tools” with in /etc/init.d/ folder. Just add the below line in the start function.

    sudo mount  -t  vmhgfs  .host:/     /mnt/hgfs

Hope it can help.

Eric Carvalho
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konglee28
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  • This works for me with Windows 10 host and Xubuntu 14.04.2 client, thank you! – Hoang Huynh Mar 15 '15 at 12:40
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    I get:

    $ sudo apt-get install open-vm-dkms Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree
    Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package open-vm-dkms

     – balupton Jun 16 '16 at 17:21
  • The following installs though: $ sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools-dkms – balupton Jun 16 '16 at 17:22
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VMWare: 15.5.0 build-14665864
Windows 10 host, guest OS in the virtual machine; Ubuntu 20.04

$ tail -n 1 /etc/fstab 
vmhgfs-fuse     <-fill-in-echo-$HOME-here>/shares fuse    defaults,max_write=32768,allow_other         0    0
$ mkdir -p $HOME/shares && sudo mount shares

Make sure that the fstab line has max_write defined as above
( I had trouble with higher values,
  you might even be safer with 32767 as that is the highest possible value in 15 bits ).

The name of the folder you have defined as "share" in VMWare settings (for the current VM) will appear as a sub-folder in ~/shares/ .

(Windows 10 host, used here - when this was found to be necessary)

Hannu
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  • Ubuntu VMWare Player running an Ubuntu VM both (20.04) this is the only answer that worked for me. – Striar Jan 04 '22 at 14:21
0

A workaround for this problem is to edit 'inode.c' and change the line '888' to remove 'compat_truncate' function call (that is responsible for this problem on kernels 3.8.x). This file is inside 'vmware-tools-distrib', so you need to perform the following steps:

Extract VMWare-Tools (probably you will get a folder called vmware-tools-distrib). Then:

 cd /vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source
 tar xf vmhgfs.tar
 cd vmhgfs-only/
 sudo gedit inode.c

Go to line 888: 

 result = compat_vmtruncate(inode, newSize);

And change it to: 

 result = 0;

Then save the file and exit gedit.

 cd ..
 rm -rf vmhgfs.tar
 tar cf vmhgfs.tar vmhgfs-only/
 rm -rf vmhgfs-only/

Now restart the installing procedure. It worked for me in Xubuntu 13.04.

Src: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2136277&page=4&p=12709627#post12709627

Mahmoud M. Abdel-Fattah
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