cant copy/paste from guest to host

[gokufast]

i was searching trying to solve this problem but nothing, the problem is that i cant copy any file from the guest and paste in the host.

I try to uninstall the vmware tools and install it again and nothing, reinstall vmware tools and nothing.

it happens when i try to copy text or files, any text and any size/type of files.

but, when i try to copy any file/text from de host to the guest it copy in the VM.

it is a problem of my host? vmwaretools? vmware workstation?

Host: Windows 7 64bits

Guest 1: Windows 7 64bits

Guest 2: Windows XP.

[Kvarkas]

Hi, could you be more specific, what exactly is not work for you? Did you manage to re-run it or it does not help?

[Kvarkas]

Mine is Mac OS High Sierra v10.13 running as vm in VMware® Workstation 12 Player (v12.5.5)

[Lannie]

I'm on a brand-new fully loaded MacBook Pro (Mid-2015 'cause I wanted real ports), upgraded to High Sierra, but I'm running VMware Fusion 10.0.1. I killed the pboard process per your instructions but it did not restore my copy-paste for text or files. Tried rebooting my Ubuntu 14.04 guest as well, and killing pboard while the guest was down. No effect.

[Kvarkas]

In your case perhaps something related to that fusion version not sure, I am working from windows base, btw if it will be not to big challenge for you - install a bootcamp and run windows 10 - then install vmware player and try same vms to run with to see if its any issues?

[RvdNieuwendijk]

According to Apple's Software Licence Agreements, that you can find at Legal - Software License Agreements - Apple, it is not allowed to run macOS on hardware not made and sold by Apple. Point 4.a in the VMware Community Participation Terms of Use, VMware Community states that you should "Do not engage in any unlawful conduct in the Community. In particular, do not post, publish, or distribute any defamatory, obscene, infringing or other unlawful material or information in the Community."  So, please do not post anything related to running macOS on VMware Workstation on this forum.

[Lannie]

Sorry, K., but I cannot do that experiment.

[Kvarkas]

In my case, I am running it on MacPro with Bootcamp so I think it's not applied, however, the question is not how to run it, but why clipboard data transfer is not working.

[michaeljf]

Clearly no one has determined a root cause for this issue nor has VMware commented (as far as I can tell).  I thought I should add my situation for reference.

The intermittent inability to copy/paste text from guest to guest, host to guest, or guest to host has been an ongoing problem for many versions.  The only things I have found to help is to completely shutdown all guests then cleanly shutdown VMware and restart.  This works for a while until whatever event causes the problem is occurs again.  What seems to be most interesting is that the issue tends to only occur on one guest at a time.  Meaning, if I have Win7 and Win10 running at the same time, if Win10 fails to copy/paste correctly, Win7 will work correctly.

My immediate guess as to what might be breaking this is that something copied to the clipboard (in the guest) is not making VMware happy.  I believe the failure occurs when the bad clipboard contents is intentionally or unintentionally attempted to be copied elsewhere (host or other guest).  Once in this failed state, the failed guest is not recoverable.  Although copy/paste continues to work within the failed guest, the contents cannot be delivered beyond the failed guest.  This is just a theory at this point.

VMware Workstation 12.5.6

Host: Windows 2008R2

Guests:  Windows 7, Windows 10, Oracle Linux 6, Oracle Linux 7

Some hints for troubleshooting and/or fixing this would be greatly appreciated.  Any idea how to get the VMware team involved???

[jumparo33]

Hi,

I have Workstation 11 and two guests: Linux and Windows. On Linux copy/paste works, but on Windows 10 nope. Any ideas, why?

[nesre]

Check your antivirus/firewall settings. Add vmware subnet (which your vm uses)  to your firewall list

[erzeleng]

All I did was suspend the VM, then resume. Copy + paste now works!

[richha555]

It’s truly amazing.  If you are plagued with the notorious VMware copy/paste problem, and try to search for the solution, you’ll discover hundreds and hundreds of posts related to the problem going back many many years.  There are lots of proposed solutions, but the truth is none of them really reliably work.  Equally amazing is that none seems to have found the cause of the problem in the first place.

I’m on a Windows 10 host with VM-Ware Workstation 14 Pro.  I have tons of VM’s running anything from Windows XP to Windows Server to all kinds of Linux’s and even Solaris.  This problem has nothing to do with the VMWare guest.  It effects all guests.  Any suggestions of restarting processes or services on the guest will not help.  When the problem occurs, it effects ALL guests running on the host.  The problem is in VM-Ware Workstation itself.

The cause is simple.  Go to a guest.  Copy something.  Go to the host.  Paste it.  Go back to a guest.  Copy.  On the host.. paste.  You can keep doing this for years.  Now copy something on one of the guests.  Go back to the host, but instead of pasting, copy something on the host.   Now you’re screwed.  If you go to the Edit menu in VMWare Workstation [not on a guest, on workstation itself], you’ll notice that “Paste” is enabled, but “Copy” and “Cut” are disabled.  You can try all you like, but it’s now impossible to copy anything from any of the guest VM’s to the host.

The only workaround that works 100% of the time is to suspend ALL guest VM’s, and REBOOT the host.  Then resume all the guests.  If you are like me, and have dozens of large VM’s running at any given time, this suspend/reboot/resume could take an hour or more.  …just to cure a stupid copy/paste problem (!).

Someone needs to explain to me why when this problem was reported many many years ago… why has it still not been fixed?   Why is there no workaround except for suspend/reboot/resume?  …or am I missing something?

[moiser]

I have the same issue with workstation 16 Hostsystem: Ubuntu 20.04 Gast: KaliLinux 2020.1 Copy File from Host->Gast works Copy File from Gast-> Host doesn't It looks like Oracles Virtualbox works better here -.-

[zahik1]

Absolutely Right!
Very annoying! 

[Tomyummmm]

Hi,

Thought I would share my solution here due to Wayland. Host: Ubuntu 22.04, Guest: Windows 10 and Kali. Workstation Pro 16.2.4

If having issues trying to copy and paste (I mean using Ctrl + V, not Edit -> Paste) from host to guest, or guest to host, check if you are using Wayland on the Linux Host / Guest. This affects many distros using Wayland.

> echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

Wayland is causing all of the issues for copy / paste of text, files, and drag and drop issues. Files over a certain size (tested over 10MB) will cause Nautilus file manager to crash directly in Wayland. Changing to X11 resolves all of these issues.

Ensure you have open-vm-tools and open-vm-tools-desktop installed first.

Steps on Ubuntu 22.04:

1. Log out from the user in the Linux Host / Guest.
2. Click on your user, DO NOT LOG IN.
3. Click on the gear icon at bottom right of the screen, change to "Ubuntu on Xorg".
4. Log in.
5. If is a Linux Host, open VMWare Workstation Pro, restart your VMs. If is a Linux guest, just restart that VM.
6. Try copy paste text bi-directionally, drag and drop files into Nautilus file manager. It should work now. Files larger than 10MB should not crash Nautilus anymore.

Note that you cannot drag and drop files to the Ubuntu Desktop itself, has to be to Nautilus.