Mount shared folders on a virtual machine

The problem: /mnt/hgfs does not show shared folders

My newly installed Ubuntu-22.04 on VMware does not show shared folders in /mnt/hgfs directory, though the target folder Desktop has been set, so the current situation is:

• Host OS: Windows 11

• Guest OS: Ubuntu 22.04

• The open-vm-tools and open-vm-tools-desktop (latest) are installed

• Neither file nor directory exists (only . and ..) inside /mnt/hgfs (the mount point)

• .host:/Desktop has been mounted to /mnt/hgfs using vmhgfs-fuse:

  $ df -h
  Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  vmhgfs-fuse 952G 428G 525G 45% /mnt/hgfs

Solution

Try to uninstall the existing mounts and remount all shared folders:

$ sudo fusermount -u /mnt/hgfs

There shouldn’t be any output from df -h | grep hgfs

$ sudo mount -t fuse.vmhgfs-fuse .host:/ /mnt/hgfs -o allow_other -o uid=1000 -o gid=1000 # use command `id` to adjust the uid and gid

$ sudo ls /mnt/hgfs # do as super user mode since there may have some permission issues
Desktop

Refresh the shared folder setting on the host side if it still doesn’t work.

Setting up auto-mount if needed:

$ echo ".host:/ /mnt/hgfs fuse.vmhgfs-fuse defaults,allow_other,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab # -a to append a new line, same as `echo ' ... ' >> /etc/fstab`
$ sudo reboot

References

• https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?legacyId=60262
• https://askubuntu.com/questions/29284/how-do-i-mount-shared-folders-in-ubuntu-using-vmware-tools