Inside your virtual machine you should be able to access the drive and copy files from/to it. Once it's ready, plug in your flash drive again. Start your virtual machine and wait for it to boot up. Go ahead and eject and unplug your flash drive. Now, your flash drive is set up to be patched into your virtual machine, so your virtual machine can see that your flash drive is connected to it. Select your flash drive from the list (Usually listed as 'Generic Mass Storage' or the name of your flash drive manufacturer). On the right side, click on the plus icon. Open your Virtual Machine settings (the orange gear icon) and select USB from the left panel. Copy the file to the flash drive, but don't eject it just yet! However, for small files, it works very well.įirst, shut down the virtual machine and plug the flash drive into your computer (It can be helpful to format it as FAT32 for greatest compatibility, but you should be fine). Keep in mind that if you have a large file, this method may not be very fast. In this case I'll use an Android VM, but the steps should be similar for most.

if you're running Android or headless Linux), you can try these methods of file transferįor this method you'll need a regular flash drive (or any external storage device) that's large enough to hold whatever you're trying to transfer and a guest OS that supports USB storage (most do). If you can't get guest additions installed (i.e. Transferring files without guest additions I've had some trouble running drag'n'drop in seamless mode, but this method usually works great (as long as it is supported) You should be able to drag and drop files from your host machine to the guest OS. Under Drag'n'drop, select which directions you want file sharing to go (I selected bidirectional).Ĭlose the settings window and launch your virtual machine. If you haven't installed Guest Additions yet, VirtualBox has an official tutorial here.Ĭlick the orange settings icon for your virtual machine, and navigate to General > Advanced. If you're running an operating system that isn't supported by guest additions, please see method #2*.* Specific instructions and a list of supported guest OSes can be found here. Guest additions are supported on recent-ish versions of most operating systems.

This is the preferred method if you've installed the guest additions for your VirtualBox guest. Transferring files with guest additions (easiest) If there are any other methods you would suggest, please let me know. I found that there isn't a lot of information out there about how to transfer files into and out of a VirtualBox guest OS, so here is a tutorial I made.

Transfer file to vm virtualbox