The VirtualBox Windows Guest Additions are designed to be installed in a virtual machine running a Windows operating system. The following versions of Windows guests are supported:
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 (any service pack)
Microsoft Windows 2000 (any service pack)
Microsoft Windows XP (any service pack)
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (any service pack)
Microsoft Windows Vista (all editions)
Generally, it is strongly recommend to install the Windows Guest Additions.
After mounting the Guest Additions ISO file, the Windows guest should automatically start an the Guest Additions installer, which installs the Guest Additions into your Windows guest.
In the "Devices" menu in the virtual machine's menu bar, VirtualBox has a handy menu item named "Install guest additions", which will automatically bring up the Additions in your VM window.
If you prefer to mount the additions manually, you can perform the following steps:
Start the virtual machine in which you have installed Windows.
Select "Mount CD/DVD-ROM" from the "Devices" menu in the virtual machine's menu bar and then "CD/DVD-ROM image". This brings up the Virtual Disk Manager described in Sectioná3.5, “The Virtual Disk Manager”.
In the Virtual Disk Manager, press the "Add" button and
browse your host file system for the
VBoxGuestAdditions.iso
file:
On a Windows host, you can find this file in the
VirtualBox installation directory (usually under
C:\Program files\Sun\xVM
VirtualBox).
On Mac OS X hosts, you can find this file in the
application bundle of VirtualBox. (Right click on the
VirtualBox icon in Finder and choose Show Package
Contents. There it is located in the
Contents/MacOS
folder.)
On a Linux host, you can find this file in the
additions folder under
where you installed VirtualBox (normally
/opt/VirtualBox-2.0.6).
On Solaris hosts, you can find this file in the
additions folder under
where you installed VirtualBox (normally
/opt/VirtualBox).
Back in the Virtual Disk Manager, select that ISO file and press the "Select" button. This will mount the ISO file and present it to your Windows guest as a CD-ROM.
Unless you have the Autostart feature disabled in your Windows
guest, Windows will now autostart the VirtualBox Guest Additions
installation program from the Additions ISO. If the Autostart feature
has been turned off, choose
VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe from the
CD/DVD drive inside the guest to start the installer.
The installer will add several device drivers to the Windows driver database and then invoke the hardware detection wizard.
Depending on your configuration, it might display warnings that the drivers are not digitally signed. You must confirm these in order to continue the installation and properly install the Additions.
After installation, reboot your guest operating system to activate the Additions.
Windows Guest Additions can be updated by running the installation program again, as previously described. This will then replace the previous Additions drivers with updated versions.
Alternatively, you may also open the Windows Device Manager and select "Update driver..." for two devices:
the VirtualBox Graphics Adapter and
the VirtualBox System Device.
For each, choose to provide your own driver and use "Have Disk" to point the wizard to the CD-ROM drive with the Guest Additions.
In order to allow for completely unattended guest installations of Windows 2000 and XP, the Guest Additions driver files have been put separately on the Additions ISO file. Just like with other third-party drivers, the files have to be copied to the OEM directory of Windows. Using the PCI hardware detection, they will then be recognized and installed automatically.
Windows Vista no longer ships a driver for the AMD PCnet Ethernet card that VirtualBox provides to the guest by default (see Sectioná6.1, “Virtual networking hardware”). As a result, after installation of Vista in a virtual machine, there will be no networking initially.
As a convenience, VirtualBox ships with a 32-bit driver for the
AMD PCnet card, which comes with the Windows Guest Additions. If you
install these in a 32-bit Vista guest, the driver will automatically be
installed as well. If, for some reason, you would like to install the
driver manually, you can find it on the Guest Additions ISO. To install
this driver, mount the Guest Additions ISO (as described above, select
"Install guest additions" from the "Devices" menu). Then, start the
Windows Hardware Wizard and direct it to the Guest Additions CD where a
driver for the PCnet card can be found in the directory
32bit\Windows\3rdParty\AMD_PCnet.
Alternatively, change the Vista guest's VM settings to use an Intel networking card instead of the default AMD PCnet card; see Sectioná3.7.5, “Network settings” for details.
Unfortunately, there is no 64-bit driver available for the AMD PCnet card. So for 64-bit Windows VMs, you should always use the Intel networking devices.