Investigating drag and drop (DnD) problems

Handling drag and drop operations across various host and guest OS combinations is a difficult and time sensitive topic. To diagnose your problem further we need you to run your VirtualBox installation with several adjustments being made. The adjustments affect the host operating system as well as the guest you want to use for this drag and drop operation.

Note: Drag and drop support only is available for VirtualBox 5.0 and newer. Older versions of VirtualBox only had experimental support and therefore are not supported.

Please also be aware that drag and drop (DnD) support at the moment only is available for the official "VirtualBox Manager" frontend. If you do use other frontends (such as !VBoxHeadless or !VBoxSDL) then this guide will not work for you.

Collecting information from the host

As always when it comes to diagnosing problems with VirtualBox the appropriate VBox.log is useful to have. To gather more verbose information about the actual drag an drop operation, please do the following:

• Shut down all VM instances and VirtualBox programs, including VBoxSVC.
• Run VirtualBox from the command line with the environment variable

  VBOX_RELEASE_LOG=+guest_dnd.e.l.l2.l3.f
  

  set (see the description of the logging facility for more background). On Windows you can use

  setx VBOX_RELEASE_LOG "+guest_dnd.e.l.l2.l3.f" /M
  

  on an Administrator command prompt to set this on a system-wide level (required). On POSIX-enabled systems like Linux, Unix or OS X you can add the following to file /etc/profile:

  export VBOX_RELEASE_LOG=+guest_dnd.e.l.l2.l3.f
  

• Reboot the host.
• Start the VirtualBox Manager and start the VM you want to diagnose drag and drop for.
• Perform and reproduce the faulty drag and drop operation (from host to guest or guest to host)

The resulting VBox.log of the VM you reproduced the drag and drop issue should now contain a lot more logging statements beginning with

DnD: <More logging comes here>