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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?

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
7

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:

  1. 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.
  2. Start VMware by clicking 'Run as Administrator'.
  3. 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.
  4. Exit from the settings GUI.
  5. Do step 3 again but enable them instead.
  6. 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.

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  • Restarting the VM OS was enough for me to make it work again.
    – riQQ
    Commented Aug 26, 2019 at 15:10
  • This did not work for me
    – m0ss
    Commented Jun 7, 2021 at 14:09
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I 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.conf

or

/etc/gdm/custom.conf

replace comment char '#' from the line:

#WaylandEnable=false

to:

WaylandEnable=false

save file and reboot!

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1
  • 1
    confirmed this fix on Ubuntu 22
    – JustWe
    Commented Sep 7, 2023 at 11:40
0

Based on this forum, Answered by Wila:

These type of issues are almost always due to a broken VMware Tools install.

Do not try a repair install from within the Guest OS as it likely will not fix this, unfortunately the "Reinstall VMware Tools" from the drop down menu also falls in that category.

You really need the guest OS to reboot in between uninstall and install to make sure that all the files are in the correct locations.

In short follow these steps:

  • Uninstall VMware Tools
  • Reboot guest OS
  • Install VMware Tools
  • Reboot guest OS.

A bit of a longer description is:

  • In Windows, go to Control Panel -> Programs & Features -> Select VMware Tools -> Uninstall

Follow the steps from the installer to completely uninstall VMware Tools

  • Reboot the guest (==Windows)
  • Then from the Virtual Machine menu select "Install VMware Tools"

If no installer appears, go to the DVD-rom within windows and click "setup" (for 32 bits windows) or "setup64" (for 64 bits windows)

Once you see an installer, click "Next" until Finish, keep the defaults.

  • Reboot the guest when done installing (it will ask by itself to reboot)
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-3

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.

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