I've setup a CentOS 7 VM on my Windows 7 laptop. In the VM settings I have both boxes checked for "Enable drag and drop" and "Enable copy and paste" and yet I'm still not able to move over even a small test file or copy from the host into the VM.
Is there anything else I need to do?
3 Answers
My VMware host is a Windows 7 machine, and I'm running Workstation 10.
This has worked for me on several VMs where I had the same problem, including my Windows 10 VM:
- Completely shut down the VM on which you want to change the settings, close all other VMs that you have open, and exit out of VMware.
- Start VMware by clicking 'Run as Administrator'.
- Before starting the VM, disable both 'Enable drag and drop' and 'Enable copy and paste' in the VM's 'Guest Isolation' setting on the Options tab.
- Exit from the settings GUI.
- Do step 3 again but enable them instead.
- Start the VM. This should allow the copy and paste to work.
Sometimes I've had to follow these steps a few times before it would work, but this ultimately solved the problem each time I tried it.
2I noticed there is an incompatibility with Wayland when Copy-Paste files into VM desktop when using GDM.
To fix that (remove Wayland) edit your custom configuration file
/etc/gdm3/custom.confor
/etc/gdm/custom.confreplace comment char '#' from the line:
#WaylandEnable=falseto:
WaylandEnable=falsesave file and reboot!
I'd be surprised if drag and drop worked across OS types. It did work for me when both host and guest were Windows. And even in Windows it was somewhat finicky -- for example, I could copy files from Explorer in the host to Explorer in the guest, but not from Explorer in the host to Outlook in the guest.
For getting your files into/out of Linux, you might have to resort to old-fashioned ways of FTP, SCP etc. On the positive side, these days there are decent GUI clients for those protocols.
