Send clipboard as keystrokes to guest VM?

[mensa84]

Hello,

I know that it is easy possible to transfer clipboard content to guest OS, when guest Windows (or VM Tools) are ready booted.

But I want to do the following:

On some machines I have a pre-boot password. Is there any possibility to send the text of the clipboard to the guest VM as keystrokes?

I know, that it is not to advice to copy / paste passwords, but these are test machines and I don't want to enter that long password everytime manually.

So is there a way to send the text of the host clipboard to the guest VM at a point of time where VM Tools are not loaded? Any special key combination?

[banackm · Accepted solution]

You should already be able to do this via the "Edit->Paste" option in the UI, and it was designed for pasting in short strings like product-keys during OS install.  (So the size of the clipboard text and the characters you can paste is more limited than our full Tools clipboard support, but it should be able to get you basic functionality while you're setting up the guest and installing tools.)

[mensa84]

Perfect, thanks a lot!